Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition [1 ed.] 087484956X, 9780874849561

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IDEAS AND STYLES IN THE WESTERN MUSICAL TRADITION

Douglass Seaton Florida State U

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TO THE INSTRUCTOR asadsoySp fm dehe Wen she premier thaAtthewe tearuy of msc 19 DeoreMal Trade moh perlsmers to eh play rng arent, camps ong or eprint nicl pees fear composes ones tae to hes more We rcomne hate sins by cloning at explo he masa hiking ef oter suscns. Out pefomances te beer when We unde sand whan how musica he past have tended commute wh thor rae when auences we know Our how cmpontons oer cps ihente moreset nesting thems ndareeterprobleme {dsaled hem Our intenan be more perceptive an bilge we thw alee things onde ry fhe coach ak tee enced ot prorned Approach (One can, ofcourse hook hat primal alan of mae tn Wester lzaton alemacvly ome ht dep ore el ew font and crorestory of msl sie The hor fms preset Ie aks tlapoa approach ewer consideration of exer lens fh masa eral changes with at sell The fs emphasis that ‘msicans nd thtdes hose nents ievtbly as inesoperatelec teparce msc hsneal and mslcontest eerience: ennecbons ola and social ven tees and contempt ‘ma vetbeeen ad developments, sd word parila tepals

ch sil in ily ca iad Tinh oy have rated tthe msi of the pedeuesor at es In un ms eng the usenet Om pase s Svar oes Rew apse shat makes Nt ust comp luitef ornaion ot acoherent oe ofthe keny of Wee se, Ts i eases tha ave ened in pects aes tnt er nent Bor ast tan genes sey he curl md clue seal hnkiigand syle In ye, she rye ‘Wises msl tn eee erase of hanging a oe Fri but n e of caging del foe masa [us ty the arco of mi ry ne expresinn. peor Tsehey mode cone fete uate ie h e pe charters o f mee ose pe In he ben Bsr Thala cent or stra dons ad comer nso leu Hele The change o ss’ athe asp om Fanhematal sabolio Keary oes crcl oe the rea spe Soe stra pens dhe item emu. the eh Thnvugh the hnstecnh cers the cominuoueflance on Mee or "speed apd the succor othe aprouches of ier ‘itera gees acount for bah unig and dng Woe Paty Serv othe expeive model or muse the Rtstasce hee he See pid and ly drm the Class-Romam pero. the ast a dps aes, the understanding tat the deamate adel as eg Seve vps om the al of he ee ceny trough hee ofthe ne en jf dedthe neBare90 ples “fc eos rpthe hanvc toseof hapetiped andae omeflowing eto. a Lean hers hasten she informa ony absorbed aed xn een nope i sme eoeren porte. The approach ‘mune ory ete does, hee ied ro tur the eden 4 ‘nrg and ene phi ead peso enorgs etal ed lucas hising Tesora no mane Be drat, svt idea norma esl ae a Doosan, dite lead wt on--make though concrete a ve rand del ogee The appoert inharheyanaeSpe kin9 cage stentoor een a rach pnt. pone as longs vor ht he le. ete rmortn of parmesan cates an Stee any lately delet the pat objet fea, which shoul be to stile rink impart the experienceof mus ls ctu othe compre eas‘lota amtng we adsb poles who Themis Since te pole ar aboutded,mus he yegthing the one the oc atone posh des among wc i devsape, ‘soulde hkl a3 eaplemert oe ebook The ‘scan eader shou toheareari mseplana and dase ae mich ma

To the Instructor

vii

as time permits. For this reason, the book has been made as short as possible Moreover, because this is a book about ideas and styles, and because the goal

is to encourage students to apply the principles learned from their reading in

their own experience of music, it avoids detailed, bar-by-bar instructions on

what the students should examine in a score

Features A special feature of Ideas and Styles is the use of writings of thinkers, artists,

and musicians to identify the ideas that underlie styles of music. The writers

quoted range widely from social and political thinkers, to philosophers, to painters, to novelists and poets, and of course to musicians themselves. Rather than provide incidental “enrichment” of the text, the quotations seek to establish what has been thought about the place of music in culture, to illustrate

values and patterns of thought, and to demonstrate how critical thinking by musicians provides foundations for music itself, Where possible, foreignlanguage quotations have been newly translated for this book

Illustrations have been carefully chosen for Ideas and Styles in order to

support the content of the text. Pictures show (1) general principles of artistic expression in different periods, (2) music notation when it embodies musical conceptions, (3) places that served as contexts for the playing and singing of music, and (4) ways in which instruments were built and music was performed.

Diagrams and music examples elucidate important concepts in Ideas and

Styles. These include diagrams of scale formations used by theorists in early

periods of music history, the liturgical calendar and the structure of the Mass, and numerous musical forms. The music examples clarify changes in the formation of polyphonic cadences, illustrate Baroque melodic ornamentations, and show the bass lines for important ground-bass forms. The supplementary material at the ends of the chapters encourages read-

ers to pursue new lines of thought and research. For each chapter there are several Questions for Reflection, intended to stimulate thinking in new directions and synthesis of ideas. Some can be answered from the chapter; some

invite readers to think critically and form their own opinions; some may call for further research. In addition, each chapter provides a list of Suggestions for Further Reading. Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition includes two appendixes.

One is a brief Guide to the Pronunciation of Church Latin. The other is an

essay on writing about music, which discusses types of writing, different approaches to particular aspects of music and its history, some sources for research, and suggestions to help students improve their writing in general

viii

To the Instructor

Teaching Aids Supplementing Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition is a substantial

Instructor's Manual. The manual's introductory chapter discusses pedagogical philosophy, outlines sample course syllabuses, and offers ideas for teaching Each following chapter corresponds to a chapter of the text itself strategies. and begins with a chapter overview; several possible teaching objectives; and a list of terms, names, and concepts. There follows a section on classroom

approaches, assignments, and topics for discussion; this includes discussion topics to stimulate the exchange of ideas in the classroom, as well as assignments, including some simple composing projects. Next some music for study is recommended, with a discussion of the important style features of each piece and a list of sources for each in historical anthologies of recordings and

scores, Finally the manual provides sample test questions in fill-in or multiple choice, true-false/justification, and short essay formats, as well as answer keys To help students in their study of music the supplementary materials for Ideas and Styles include a worksheet for score study and listening, which guides students to a focused and systematic approach to musical pieces. A set of transparency masters is also available to instructors. These help to amplify the discussion in the text and offer visual representations of abstract ideas.

Acknowledgments

This book has profited immensely from the contributions of many people other than its author. Several classes of students worked with it in its draft stages, patiently noting typographical and factual errors and making suggestions, My colleagues Elias Dann and Jeffery Kite-Powell at The Florida State University provided useful comments. Thanks go especially to my former teaching assistant Marian Wilson for her willingness to teach from the book and to offer her ideas, The reviewers who read Ideas and Styles during its preparation for publication offered both tremendous support and rigorous, always constructive criticism. Their contributions cannot be adequately rewarded, but I acknowledge them here with deep appreciation: Thomas Bauman, Stanford University; John Brobeck, University of Arizona; Gregory Butler, University of British Columbia; Camilla Cai, Kenyon College; Richard 5. James, Bowling Green State University, Douglas Lee, Vanderbilt University; Christopher Reynolds, University of California, Davis; and Stan Stanford, Portland State University

To the Instructor

ix

The efforts of Mayfield Publishing Company and its entire staff—especially the firm, tactful, and creative contributions of Janet M. Beatty as sponsoring editor and the painstaking work of Carol Zafiropoulos as production editor—merit the gratitude of the author and readers of this book. The excellent copyediting of Loralee Windsor and design work by Cynthia Bassett Bogue are also gratefully acknowledged Finally, there are many who have made the immensely important, intangible contribution of moral support. It would be impossible to list all the friends and colleagues who have alternately prodded and provided encouragement Most of all I wish to thank my wife, Gayle, without whose humor, patience, intellect, and love none of it would have happened.

TO THE STUDENT

I recently asked my class why they were studying the history of music. One

student suggested that music history was a special torture designed as part of the curriculum to punish them for having too much fun with music. Another,

more seriously, proposed that it was inherently valuable to memorize the names and dates of important figures and events in the history of music. Yet another thought that studying music history was a way to make music students learn about other fields of cultural history, disguising that intention behind the mask of a music course. Finally, we agreed that the main reason to study the history of music was to make ourselves better musicians. And this

is so whether we are primarily players or singers, composers, or listeners.

The real reason to study music history is to encounter musical thinking,

Like any other area of human experience and endeavor, music has been approached from many points of view. Performers will present music more effectively if they know what purposes and values inform their music. Com-

posers will enrich their imaginations by understanding other composers’ ways

of musical thinking and how they have created solutions to musical problems. Listeners will hear more sensitively and alertly when they enrich their understanding with a knowledge of the social contexts and philosophical ideas from which the music sprang. Music in the Western tradition—and, of course, in other traditions as well—is a form of expression and communication. Like any form of communication, it becomes more meaningful when we become more

aware of its motives and the foundations of its thought processes

There are two reasons for approaching the study of musical thinking from a historical perspective, and correspondingly there are two types of music history. First, music is inextricably woven into the fabric ofall human activity; that is, history affects music and music affects history. The purposes for music—whether to worship, to glorify political powers, or to entertain the xi

xii

To the Student

common citizen; the sources of support for music—what countries had the necessary peace and leisure to enjoy it, who had the money to buy it; the philosophical foundations for music—the emphasis on intellect or emotion, the models by which it was expected to achieve expressiveness; the art and literature surrounding music—the architectural spaces in which it was performed, the poetry that was sung; the technological achievements that facilitate music—the means of reproducing scores, the invention of new instrutents: all these and many more factors enhance and indeed are inseparable from the understanding of the music itself. Such factors come and go, reinforce or conflict with each other at different times. This book will identify some of these forces that have shaped musical styles, The second type of music history has to do with the history of music in and of itself. In Western culture musicians, like thinkers in any field, have responded to their past. Such responses may be positive or negative; they may build on what has gone before or may reject it in favor of new directions. Because ideas take time to achieve their full development and because there is no one ideal style, it is common to view the history of music (or cultural history in general) as a series of contrasting though typically overlapping periods, with phases of conception, development, and maturity. We must acknowledge that this way of thinking is peculiarly Western and that it is not necessary to music; other cultures do not view human thought as requiring such forward motion or history as requiring divisions into successive periods characterized by emergence, attainment of full stature, and decline, Moreover, we must not allow our generalizations regarding period styles to obscure the complexity and diversity of a period; individuals differ, the characteristics of one century's music survive into the following centuries, and ideas that have been underground reemerge. Neither should we think that the value of any music depends on its belonging to any particular period or phase within a period. Different types of music incorporate their own value systems, and music of one type cannot be judged by the criteria of another. Further, the conception of a new way of thinking, the exploration and building up of its possibilities, and its full mastery all have values of particular kinds. Although we may read about the ideas and styles of music in books or

discuss them in the classroom, we must experience them in music. We may understand the ideas in a book about music, but we will only truly comprehend them through hearing and studying the music. When I first began to study music history, a wise teacher told me, “The history of music is the music uself." | made myselfa bookmark with that statement and put it in my music history textbook so that | would be reminded of that truth every day. It is still there. After all,

what we all want to learn is what creative musicians have

thought, felt, and expressed in their music. The best thing that a book can do

/

To the Student

xiii

is to lead you deeper into the music itself. So you should spend much more

time listening to and analyzing representative works than you do reading

Some works to study will be suggested along the way, and collections of

well-chosen pieces are available for analysis. You will be well on your way if you regard this book as a supplement to the music, rather than vice versa! One last word about what this book is and is not intended to do.

It

provides, as the title suggests, a look at some important contributions to Western musical thinking. It intends to encourage you to respond with some

thoughts of your own about the music you make and hear. But this book is not a comprehensive history of music; there are certainly many interesting events, fine composers, and important musical works that cannot be mentioned here. It is also not a compendium of information that a musically cultured person

should know. I hope you will find areas in which you wish to know more, and

that you will pursue them in more detailed studies as far as your interest takes you. You may wish to begin with dictionaries and encyclopedias of music, or larger and more detailed histories, or studies of musical philosophy and theory; or you may prefer to go directly to specific books and articles on composers, instruments, genres, and so on, Read widely, enjoy conflicting ideas, and form and refine your own. Most of all, always remember to keep the music foremost!

CONTENTS

L susicin crassicat antiquity 1 Mac inteeof fend Piro Ane rece 1 Nas and oe onaroan ofa 3 Grek Misc TheyRane 4 7 ote tien 9 9 {eestor Session orRfeton Further eating 2. The EARLY CHRISTIAN PERIOD 1

“The Growth ofthe Chistian Church an es Mase 1 The Jewish Hertage 12 The Dsersfeation of Practice 16 The Eater ewe 18 Local usp rcs 8 Questionsfor Reflection 19 Suggestionfor Father Reading 19 Naer 19

3) THe CHANT OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 2 The Establishment of «Catholic Traduon 21 The Roman Liturgy 22 Serger Nor 25

xvi

Contents

Aesthetic Considerations Regarding the Chant 29 The Musical Style of the Chant 30 The Music Theory of the Chant 32 Later Developments in the Liturgical Chant The Trope 38 Liturgical Drama 41

38

Questions for Reflection 43 Suggestions for Further Reading 44 Notes

44

MEDIEVAL MUSIC 45

SECULAR

SONG

Secular Music in the Early Middle Ages

Latin Songs 46 Epics and Minstrels 47

Troubadours and Trouvéres German Court Music 49

AND

INSTRUMENTAL

45

+7

Monophonic Songs in Other Nations 50 Italy 50 Spain and Portugal 50 Britain 51 Medieval Instruments

51

String Instruments 52 Wind Instruments 53 Percussion Instruments 53 Organs

53

The Use of Instruments in Medieval Music 54 Questions for Reflection 56

Suggestions for Further Reading 56 Notes

57

THE DEVELOPMENT

OF POLYPHONY

The Significance of Polyphony 59 Carolingian Polyphony 60

Romanesque Developments 60 Free Organum 60

Rhythmic Independence 61

Harmonic

Freedom

63

Gothic Thinking and Style 63

59

Contents

Notre Dame Polyphony 66 Rhythmic Order in Organum: Leonin 66 Perotin

69

Cadences

70

The Medieval Motet

71

Late Thirteenth-Century Developments 72 New Developments in Rhythmic Notation 72 Hocket

73

Symbolic Values in Medieval Polyphony 74 Questions for Reflection

75

Suggestions for Further Reading 77 Notes

77

MUSIC IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES The Increasing Secularization of Culture 79 Ars Nova

79

81

Isorhythm 83 The Roman de Fauvel

84

Form in Secular Song 84

Cadence Patterns in the Fourteenth Century

Guillaume de Machaut

86

87

Mannerism: The Ars Subtilior 88 The Italian Trecento

89

English Polyphony 90 Gymel and English Discant 91 Secular Music:

Rota

91

Questions for Reflection

92

Suggestions for Further Reading 92

THE RISE OF THE RENAISSANCE 93 Renaissance Humanism 93 The Hundred Years’ War and English Music on the Continent 97 John Dunstable 98 The New Style on the Continent 98 Guillaume Dufay 99 Gilles Binchois

102

Polyphonic Cadences 102 Questions for Reflection 105 Suggestions for Further Reading 105

xvii

xviii

Contents

THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

107

The Growth of the Renaissance Musical Style in the North 107 Johannes Ockeghem 107 Jacob Obrecht 108 Josquin des Prez and the Ars Perfecta

109

The Ascendancy of the Northern Style 111 Music for Social Use in the High Renaissance

114

Regional Variations of the Cosmopolitan Style in Secular Music The French Chanson

116

116

English Music 116 German Music 117 The Italian Frottola and Madrigal

117

The Poetic Model for Musical Expression 118 Questions for Reflection

120

Suggestions for Further Reading 121

Notes

121

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC IN THE RENAISSANCE The Place of Instruments in Renaissance Music 123 Renaissance Instruments

123

Consorts 124 Broken Consorts. 125 Plucked Instruments

125

Keyboard Instruments 126 Tablature 126 Instruments and Vocal Music 127 Instrumental Adaptations of Vocal Music and Genres 127 Instrumental Genres

129

Dances 129 Variations

130

Instrumental Pieces in the Style of Improvisations 131 Questions for Reflection

131

Suggestions for Further Reading 132

10

THE REFORMATION

133

The Background of the Reformation 133 The Music of the Lutheran Reformation 134

123

Contents The Calvinist Reformation 136 The Reformation in England 137

The Counter-Reformation 138 Palestrina 138 Tomas Luis da Victoria and Roland de Lassus Faith, Music, and the Power of Words

Questions for Reflection

139

139

140

Suggestions for Further Reading 141 Notes

ll

141

THE WANING

OF THE RENAISSANCE

Italian Music at the End of the Sixteenth Century

143

Late Renaissance Mannerism 144 The Italian Style in England 146 France 147

The Venetian Style

148

The Significance of Late Renaissance Styles 149 Questions for Reflection

150

Suggestions for Further Reading 150

12

THE ARRIVAL OF THE BAROQUE Rationalism

151

Aesthetic Considerations

152

The Doctrine of Affections 153 The Florentine Camerata

155

Monody and the Basso Continuo 159 Concertato

161

Seconda Prattica

162

Expression of New Ideas in New Styles 163 Questions for Reflection 164

Suggestions for Further Reading 164 Notes

13

165

THE EARLY BAROQUE

Three Styles 167 The Creation of Opera 167 First Experiments in Opera 168 Orfeo 169

167

151

143

xix

Contents

Developments in Italian Opera 170 Stylistic Trends 170 Vocal Chamber Music 172

Texture and Form Sacred Music 173 The Sacred Concerto

Oratorio

171

174

175

Seventeenth-Century Instrumental Music 176 The Ricercar 177 The Sonata 177 Sets of Variations 178 Dance Music 179 Improvisatory Instrumental Music 180 Questions for Reflection 180 Suggestions for Further Reading

14

THE HIGH BAROQUE

180

183

French Opera in the Seventeenth Century

183

The Background 183 The Beginnings of French Opera 185 Musical Style in French Baroque Opera 186 English Music in the Seventeenth Century

187

The First Stuarts 187 The Commonwealth 187 The Restoration

187

Italian Opera 188 The Cantata and Other Vocal Chamber Music 190 German Musical Genres 191 Keyboard Music

191

Musical Drama 193 The Development of Instrumental Forms and Idioms 193 Style Developments in Instrumental Music 194 Fugue 194 The Suite 195 The Mature Baroque Sonata 196 Concerto 198 Questions for Reflection 200 Suggestions for Further Reading 201

Contents

15

xxi

THE END OF THE BAROQUE ERA 203 The Character of the Late Baroque Era 203 Opera Seria—Handel and Others

The Intermezzo

204

206

Opera in France 207 Handel and the Oratorio

207

Germany 208 Johann Sebastian Bach 209

Bach’s Early Career 210

The Court of Weimar 211 The Court of Céthen 211 The City of Leipzig 212 Bach’s Culmination of Baroque Styles 214 Questions for Reflection

216

Suggestions for Further Reading 216

16

NEW

CURRENTS

CENTURY

IN

THE

EIGHTEENTH

217

Departure from the Baroque 217 The Development of the Tonal System

The Galant Style 219 In France 219 Outside of France

EARLY

218

222

French and Italian Operatic Comedy

La Guerre des Bouffons 223 The empfindsamer Stil 224 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 225 Keyboard Instruments

223

226

Song 227 Structure in Early Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music 227

Developments in Instrumental Music 228

Questions for Reflection 230 Suggestions for Further Reading 231 Notes 231

17

THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIOD The Enlightenment 233 The Classic Outlook 234

233

xxii

Contents The Situation of the Musician 237 Contrasting Careers for Classical Musicians: Haydn and Mozart

Franz Joseph Haydn 239 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 241 Comic Opera in the Early Classic Period 243 Opera Seria and Opera Reform 244

Instrumental Genres and the Sonata Plan 246

The Symphony 247 The String Quartet 247

The Keyboard Sonata 248 The Concerto 249 The Divertimento 249 The Sonata Form and Its Variants Harmonic Plan 250

Thematic Plan

250

250

Outline of Sonata Form

251

Application of the Form 251 Adaptations of the Form 252 Expression and Function 253 Questions for Reflection 255 Suggestions for Further Reading 255 Notes

18

256

THE HIGH CLASSIC PERIOD

257

The Position of Haydn and Mozart 257 Chamber Music

Symphony 260 Concerto

259

260

Mozart’s Mature Operas 262 Opera Seria 262 Singspiel 263 Collaboration with Da Ponte 264 Die Zauberfléte

266

A New Model for Expression 267 The Classic Beethoven

268

Beethoven's Early Years in Bonn. 268 Beethoven's First Decade in Vienna 268 The Music of Beethoven's First Vienna Period 269 Colonial and Revolutionary America

270

239

Contents

xxiii

Questions for Reflection 272 Suggestions for Further Reading 272

19

THE RISE OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT Philosophical Roots of Romantic Thought 275 Politics and Social Revolution 276

The Concept of Organic Unity 277 Romantic Art 277 Themes in Romantic Art 278 Techniques of Romantic Art 279

The Romantic Movement in the History of Musical Style 282 Beethoven from 1802 282 Beethoven and the Artist as Hero

Beethoven's Heroic Style 285

283

Beethoven's Sketchbooks 287 Beethoven's Personal Life in His Middle Period

287

Beethoven’s Last Period 287 Beethoven's Influence on Nineteenth-Century Music 289 The Romantic Lied

Franz Schubert

289

290

Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera 292 Rossini

293

Opera in France 294 German Romantic Opera 295 The Social Context for Music in the Nineteenth Century Questions for Reflection 297

Suggestions for Further Reading 298 Notes

20

298

THE MATURE

ROMANTIC

The Context for Mature Romanticism

Composers’ Life-Styles 299

PERIOD 299

Composers’ Literary and Artistic Activities 300 Romantic Lyricism in Italian Opera

Style 302 Performance Practice 303 Giuseppe Verdi 304 French Grand Opera

306

302

299

295

275

xxiv

Contents

The Cult of Virtuosity 307 Lyricism and Virtuosity—Chopin 309 Salons and Drawing Rooms 310 Instrumental Genres in Romantic Music 311

Piano Music 311 Orchestral Music 312 Romantic Musical Style 313

Expansion of Sound Romantic Harmony Form in Romantic Recognition of the

Vocabulary 314 314 Music 315 Musical Heritage 316

The Midpoint of the Nineteenth Century

Questions for Reflection 318 Suggestions for Further Reading 318

21

317

THE TWILIGHT OF ROMANTICISM

321

The New German School 321 The Artwork of the Future 323

Wagner's Music Dramas 325 Wagner's Librettos 326 Wagner's Musical Style 328 Late Romanticism 329 Austria 329 France 331

Italy 332 The Second Generation of the New German Style 333 Wolf and Mahler 333

Richard Strauss 334 Alexander Scriabin 335

Realism in Late Nineteenth-Century Opera

Giacomo Puccini Exoticism

335

336

336

Late Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

337

Bohemia 338 Russia 338

Nationalism in Other Countries 340 The Situation at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Questions for Reflection 342 Suggestions for Further Reading 342

341

Contents

22

THE ARRIVAL OF THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY 345 A Crisis in Artistic Ideas and Styles 345

Impressionism 345 Claude Debussy 347

Diffusion and Limits of Impression 349 The Aesthetics of Ugliness 349 Primitivism 351

Expressionism 353

Arnold Schoenberg 353 Alban Berg 354

Advantages and Problems in Atonal Expressionism 355 An American Original: Charles Ives 355 Questions for Reflection 357 Suggestions for Further Reading 358 Notes 358

23

BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS 361 A Period of Readjustment 361 The Twelve-Tone Method of Composition 362 Schoenberg after 1920 364 Adaptations of the Twelve-Tone Method 365 Serialism 365 Artistic Objectivity

Neoclassicism 368 France

366

368

Stravinsky's Neoclassic Music and Thought 369 Germany 371 New Tonal Theory 371 The Influence of Regional Musics 372 The Music of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union 375 The United States 377

Jazz 378 Incorporating Jazz into Traditional Genres. 378 The Avant-Garde

379

Questions for Reflection 380 Suggestions for Further Reading 381 Notes

382

xxv

xxvii

24

Contents

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 383 History and Contemporary Music 383 384

Total Control

The Exploration of New Timbres: Extended Techniques 385

Electronic Music

387

Computers 388 The Performer

389

Indeterminacy 389 Indeterminacy, Performers, and Computers Minimalism

390

391

Mixed-Media and Performance-Oriented Music 391

Jazz and Pop Music 393 Composers in Late Twentieth-Century Society

394

Women and Minority Composers 394 The Situation at the End of the Twentieth Century 395 Questions for Reflection 396

Suggestions for Further Reading 397 Notes

397

Appendix A Research and Writing in Music History 399 Appendix B_ Pronouncing Church Latin: A Quick Reference 407 Index

411

IDEAS AND STYLES IN THE WESTERN MUSICAL TRADITION

pupewe

MUSIC IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Music in the Life and Philosophy of Ancient Greece

The culture of ancient Greece has provided the philosophical and intellectual roots for much of later Western culture, Time and again thinkers have returned to the ideas of the great early philosophers to revitalize and redirect contemporary imagination. This once led the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to speak of all later Western philosophy as a series of foomotes to Plato. In the sense that it provides a model or standard, we refer to the culture of ancient Greece as “classic.” The Greek writers had a great deal to say about music, and we will find that their ideas have influenced Western music at several important stages in its history. But unlike Greek thought, ancient Greek music has not survived in any significant quantity to the present. The total repertoire from which we can study the music itself consists of only a few dozen examples, most of them fragmentary and dating from comparatively late. It is ironic that the Greek philosophers had almost nothing to say about their sculpture and architecture, which still exist, while they devoted a great deal of discussion to their music, which has nearly vanished. From the writings of the time we know that the Greeks had an active, vibrant musical life. Music played an important role in a variety of social contexts. For example, musical art was intimately connected to literary art, Plato defined music as consisting of words, harmony, and rhythm, while Aristotle listed words, melody, and rhythm as the components of poetry. The epics of Homer were sung, as were the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus. As in all cultures, music accompanied religious ritual. In addition, there were musical competitions for players and 1

2

Chapter 1

singers, as important as the Olympic athletic contests. And these categories account for only what we would call “art” music; there was surely much folk

music as well. The scarcity of surviving ancient Greek music leaves the scholar especially frustrated because what we can leam from the philosophical and theoretical documents is so fascinating

The organized study of musical phenomena was a lively concern in

Greece. The Greeks understood the acoustic properties of musical tones early,

and the identification of the simple mathematical relationships underlying the

harmonic series were attributed to the mathematician Pythagoras in the late sixth century 8:

Plato and Aristotle, the two major philosophers of the fourth century ec,

had different views of music—views that have reemerged at various times in

the history of musical thought. Plato’s roots were in mathematics and abstract

thinking, his philosophical affinity was for the ideal, and he viewed the sensible world as merely the shadow of a pure and abstract Reality. For him music derived its value from its reflection of ideal forms, and its purpose was to inculcate excellence rather than to provide pleasure. Aristotle's background in biological studies led him to take a more inductive and empirical approach, and he adopted a more pragmatic view of music. To Aristotle music did not reflect abstractions but imitated human action (mimesis); he also allowed for

music to be pursued for pleasurable or practical ends

Music and the Doctrine of Ethos

One of the major contributions of Greek philosophy, shared by both Plato and Aristotle, is the doctrine of ethos. Applied to music, this doctrine is the belief that music can powerfully affect human character and behavior. Such beliefs may be found in many musical cultures, of course, most clearly those in which music is related to shamanism. We shall see that it continued to be reflected in much later historical periods, although itis rarely taken literally in Western music today The doctrine of ethos was applied to music by the Greek thinkers in a variety of ways. First, music could be related to the spiritual life in the context of religion, The gods of Olympus represented a variety of characters, and the worship of each was necessarily suited to the specific deity. A major distinction was made between the worship of Apollo, which was characterized by discipline and restraint, and that of Dionysus, which was typically emotional, even orgiastic, and in consequence, as one might well imagine, extremely popular The terms Apollonian for music that is abstract and appeals to the intellect and Dionysian for music that arouses strong emotions have been employed more recently, and the two inclinations have operated in uneasy tension throughout our music history. The music employed in worship clearly reflected such distinctions. In secular life, as well, music was considered a

Music in Classical Antiquity

3

major component of education. Some Greeks believed that ennobling music could produce a noble and virtuous character, while exposure to lascivious music would lead to a debauched life. Characteristically, when Plato discussed

the political organization of the ideal state in his Republic, he prescribed certain types of music and forbade others. To Plato the true value of music was its power to educate one to virtue. Equally characteristically, Aristotle believed that even impassioned and Dionysian music had value in inducing emotional

release or catharsis. He recognized different social circumstances and was less concerned with restricting music to certain types, but rather concentrated on

applying to each situation music with the appropriate ethos.

Ethos was understood to be rooted in specific aspects of musical style One of the aspects of style that contributed to musical ethos was instrumenta-

tion. The lyre or kithara, a stringed instrument, was associated with the cult of Apollo and therefore, naturally, with more noble types of ethos; the aulos, a

double-barreled reed pipe employed in the Dionysian rites, obviously evoked a sensual and less-disciplined ethos.

(Fig.

1.1) In similar fashion, rhythms,

that is, poetic meters, had their own ethical force. Finally, pitch patterns, generally referred to as harmonia (pl. harmoniai, often translated as mode"), also produced specific ethos. Aristotle (Politics) regarded the Dorian harmonia

as “steadfast and most manly in character,” the Phrygian as leading to ecstasy

and emotion, and the Lydian as suitable for children because it had the “capac-

ity to contain both elegance and educativeness.” Plato (Republic) accepted Dorian and Phrygian music but rejected the Mixolydian and Syntonolydian

harmoniai as too mournful, while he considered certain Ionian and Lydian harmoniai “slack” and likely to induce softness and sloth

Characteristics of Music

Despite the paucity of musical documentation, we can determine some characteristic aspects of Greek music itself, Of primary importance is the connection of music with words. We have already noted the similarity of Plato’s and Aristotle's definitions of music and poetry, respectively, and it is clear from the surviving music that the Greek musical archetype was a sung text. One effect of this conception was that musical rhythm corresponded to the rhythm of poetic verse. Since we know that the Greeks employed instruments—the kithara, the aulos, and a wide variety of other instruments, including percussion—vocal performances may well have been accompanied by instruments There is no evidence, however, that complex textures were used; rather the instruments may have doubled the vocal melodies in monophonic texture or varied from the vocal lines in their ornamentation of basic patterns to produce heterophony. There is also evidence of the use of instruments without voices, but such music was apparently improvised. This would have been the case for the competitions of virtuoso instrumentalists and perhaps for dancing

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Chapter 1

a

Figure 1.1

Music contest between Apollo and Marsyas, relief sculpture (320 8), According to myth, the aulos player Marsyas challenged the god Apollo to a musical competition. Apollo, playing the lyre, defeated Marsyas and had him flayed for his insolence.

The myth illustrates the relative virtue of the two

most important Greek instruments. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)

Greek Music Theory

Another major contribution made by the Greeks to Western music was a sophisticated theory of musical pitch organization constructed according to acoustical principles, The Greeks actually developed the concept of discrete pitches ordered by frequency into what they called either harmonia or tonos (pl. tonoi), a theoretical construct roughly comparable to our idea of a scale (Fig. 1.2)

The Greek music theorists viewed their total pitch spectrum according to a plan known as the Greater Perfect System. This was a series of four intervals of the fourth or tetrachords (“four strings”), placed consecutively so that they formed two pairs of conjunct fourths (that is, the tetrachords share one common pitch) separated by a whole tone. The addition of one more whole tone at one end of the spectrum created a span of two octaves. The following diagram will help clarify this plan; the upper level shows the spectrum divided

.

Music in Classical Antiquity

5

Figure 1.2 One form of Greek musical notation is preserved in the first Delphic hymn to Apollo, inscribed on the marble wall of the Treasury of the Athenians at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. The letters that indicate notes can be seen between the lines of text. (Archaeological Museum, Delphi)

into fourths in the Greek fashion, while the lower level indicates the relation

to the octave-based scale system (diagonal slashes mark disjunctions; dashes

indicate the number of semitone spaces within the tetrachords or octaves; the

points of conjunction are indicated by equal signs): +

tetrachord — tetrachord

tetrachord

_tetrachord

The theorists also recognized a Lesser Perfect System, composed of three conjunct tetrachords and the added note. + tetrachord tetrachord tetrachord

pouachore, X/4----1=4-

aamainena 4----1

(The Greeks thought of the higher-frequency pitches as being at the “lower” end of the system and vice versa—a consequence of the fact that the

6

Chapter |

kithara was held like the modern guitar with the lowest-pitched strings farthest from the ground—so modern readers have to invert as well as translate their writings. This makes it difficult for modern musicians to keep the patterns clear. In these diagrams, the pitch at the leit is the one the Greeks would have thought of as highest but that we would now call lowest, while the pitch at the right is the one they would have called lowest and we would call highest.) Between the fixed pitches at the ends of each tetrachord came two intermediate pitches: these were not always placed in the same positions, however. There were actually three different ways to fit them in, each of which produced a different genus (pl. geneva) of tetrachord. The diatonic genus divided the tetrachord into two whole tones plus a semitone. The chromatic genus divided it into two semitones and an augmented whole tone. The enharmonic genus reduced the distances separating the three pitches at one end of the tetrachord still further to quarter tones, resulting in a ditone (two-whole-tone) gap to the remaining pitch. The three genera can be depicted as follows: Diatonic genus -

tetrachord 43-2-1 Chromatic genus tetrachord 432--1 Enharmonic genus_tetrachord MBTnw oil Another aspect of the Greek theoretical concept of pitch organization was the elimination of redundancy by focusing attention on a single or characteristic octave, just as we do today. The Greeks had seven different ways to take an

octave from the Greater Perfect System, thus producing divisions of the octave

into the various groupings of tonoi (or harmoniai) just as, for example, the

diatonic white-key octave scale on a modern keyboard produces a major scale beginning on C ora natural minor scale beginning on A. In the following chart the symbol X has been used for the note of conjunction (i.e. conjunet tetrachords:

Hypodorian tonos Hypophtygian tonos Hypolydian tonos Dorian tonos Phrygian tonos Lydian tonos Mixolydian tonos (compare - major natural minor =

LV4 S.-H. RSL 2-0 @- 10S. 2 NSA 3-2-1/43-2-X3 WG 2 VRS. DK H-X9 -2-1043-2 3. PRS RS 14S 43-2-X3-2-1/4 c-d-ef-g-a-be’ A- Be-d ef - g-a)

4=1) between

Music in Classical Antiquity

7

The relation of these theoretical constructs to actual Greek music and specifically to the ethical effects attributed to musical modes (harmoniai) by the philosophers is obscure. It is likely that the use of a particular array of tones within the range of the characteristic octave produced certain melodic patterns or formulas that would be common to all pieces employing the same tonos. This would account for the dual usage of the word harmonia—in a technical sense by the theorists and in a more empirical sense by the philosophers Although the pitch system was quite different from what has been used in Western music for the last few centuries, the attempt to explain music on the basis of a systematic grouping of articulated pitches organized according to acoustical relationships was a major contribution of the Greeks to the history of Western musical thought. As we shall see, a later age found it possible to maintain a great musical culture without such an abstract theoretical foundation, It is significant, however, that the eventual rediscovery of the Greek theoretical heritage encouraged construction of a new system Music in Ancient Rome

Music in the culture of Rome was built on the heritage received from Greece The Romans apparently adapted the music of the Greeks to their own manner of life. Instead of the philosophical and theoretical pursuits that occupied the Greek thinkers, the Romans were more inclined to indulge in music for pleasure As a result, musical works became more grandiose and elaborate, The instruments were developed to provide more volume and were played in huge ensembles. At the same time, increased complexity in the melodies gave rise toa new emphasis on virtuosity. This was supported by the influence of Oriental styles that entered Roman culture as a result of military conquest in the East, Wealthy Romans employed professional musicians, including slaves, to entertain at all kinds of social events and adopted the Greek practice of musical competitions. The stars of that time were idolized, fawned over, and lusted after as much as rock stats of the twentieth century. Patricians also aspired to virtuosity. For example, the Emperor Nero's concern for his skill as a kithara player and relative indifference to the crisis in his capital led to the familiar statement “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” ‘As one would expect, the military conquests of the Roman armies provided one special field for musical development, the field of battle. It is not surprising that this period produced notable developments in brass instruments. The Romans did not contribute significantly to the philosophy or theory of music as did the Greeks, although they developed and transmitted some of

8

Chapter 1

the older Greek ideas and ideals through the early centuries of the Christian era. At the close of that period, however, the Romans made some attempts to

consider music from a philosophic viewpoint, in connection with the way music fit into the educational system

In the fifth century Martianus Capella outlined a program for education

based on seven

“liberal arts.”

These were arranged into two divisions: (1) the

trivium, consisting of the three language arts, grammatica (grammar), rhetorica

(rhetoric or style), and dialectica (logic); and (2) the quadrivium, comprising the four mathematical disciplines, arithmetica (basic mathematics), geometria

(plane geometry), musica (music), and astronomia (astronomy). The grouping seems a bit peculiar compared to modern curricula, in which music is placed closer to literature than to mathematics and natural science. Capella assumed, however, that the study of music would deal exclusively with harmonic proportions. Thought of in that way rather than as an expressive art form, music takes a natural place between the study of spatial relationships in geometry

and the observation of the regular motions of the stars and planets. More influential in the history of music than Martianus Capella was the scholar Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 480-524).

Boethius followed

Capella’s lead by writing treatises on each of the seven liberal arts. In his De institutione musica (On the organization of music) he codified many of the

ancient ideas about music. Like Capella, Boethius was concerned only with what he called musica speculativa speculative” or “reflective” music, from the Latin speculum, meaning “mirror”) because by its harmonic proportions music reflects mathematical principles. He addressed the musicus (the true musician), who understood the principles of music. Boethius saw no place in the

liberal education for musica practica, the domain of the mere cantor (literally

singer,” but including all performing musicians), who had the talent to make beautiful sounds but no understanding of the principles of the art. Boethius's greatest contribution to musical thought was a classification of music in three divisions. The most important of these was musica mundana (the music of the spheres), which was the product of the regular rhythmic

motions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, Such harmonious relationships, Boethius proposed, must produce musical tones, even though these tones

could not actually be heard by human ears. (Christian thinkers later reasoned

that our inability to hear this heavenly music was caused by the corruption of our senses through Adam's sin.) The second type of music was musica humana (human music), the music that gave harmony to human existence. Human

harmony would govern life by keeping everything in proportion, both individually and in society; a personality or relationship that was out of proportion would be appropriately described as disharmonious and consequently unmusical. The lowest form of music, musica instrumentalis, incorporated all sounding music, including singing. Thus actual music sung or played would present a concrete image of the order of the universe, a reflection—following in the

tradition of Plato—of a great principle or higher Reality.

Music in Classical Antiquity

9

When Roman culture collapsed after the transferof the imperial capital to Constantinople and the sacking of Rome in the fifth century by northern invaders, there was little time or concem for the finer aspects of life. Survival ina dangerously unstable world became a primary concern. Many of the great documents of Greek culture disappeared from view. As Christianity spread the relics of pagan art were crowded out and later deliberately suppressed. Therefore we must next turn to the Christian culture Questions for Reflection

What is the proper place of music in education? How has this changed since the periods of Plato and Aristotle, Martianus Capella, and Boethius? How has the understanding of the therapeutic value of music developed since the Greeks? Study the discussions of music in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle's Politics and compare their ideas > What did the Greeks know about the acoustical properties of musical tones and the relationships between tones, and how was that reflected in the system of tonoi or harmoniai? Suggestions for Further Reading

For translations of some of the important discussions of music by the writers cited in this chapter, see Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950); Andrew Barker, ed., Greek Musical Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 1, The Musician and His Art. Two studies of Greek musical thought are Warren D. Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Edward Lippmann, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964)

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN PERIOD

The Growth of the Christian Church and Its Music

Christianity rose just as the power of Rome was passing its peak, It began in a small comer of the Mediterranean where a tiny band of Jews embraced the rabbi Jesus’s message that love of God and for one’s neighbor was the principle that would redeem humankind, a principle stronger than the law of Moses or the power of Caesar. Of course the ruling powers in both Jerusalem and Rome considered this faith highly subversive. Jesus was executed for treason, and for three hundred years Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom throughout the Roman Empire. In 4p 313 the Emperor Constantine, who himself became a Christian, issued the Edict of Milan, allowing religious freedom to Christians. The church was free to grow, and it became the dominant power in Western culture. Because of this, it should not be surprising that the history of Western music for a long period becomes the history of the music of the Christian religion Our understanding of music from the fourth to the ninth century is also influenced by the fact that the historical evidence preserved from those centuries comes substantially through the church. As the church's power grew, it rooted out paganism and its cultural relics with the same vigor that had been exercised against the church in the three preceding centuries, Meanwhile, with Europe in political turmoil and general learning on the wane, the church's reliance on scripture gave ita special reason to preserve literacy, which pagan religion did not have. Moreover, together with architecture and the visual arts music was an essential medium of worship. And finally, Christian worship was really the only cultural activity whose custodians had the wherewithal to maintain it. 1

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Chapter 2

It was not to be taken for granted that music would thrive in the young religion, however. There was a certain suspicion of the power music could hold over the minds and hearts of the faithful. Music had been important to the Greek and Roman religious cults and therefore had dangerous associations with paganism, The belief in musical ethos remained strong, It manifested itself in the musical philosophy of the church fathers. The dilemma contemplated by St Augustine (354-430) in his Confessions sums up the problem. On the one hand, the sensuous pleasure derived from music threatened to distract him from the words being sung and tum his attention away from the contemplation of God. Nevertheless Augustine recognized the power of music to fire devotion, especially that of the newer and weaker minds among the faithful, and he recalled “the tears that I shed on hearing the songs of the church in the early days, soon after | had recovered my faith.” Indeed, Augustine bears an honorable place in the history of Christian music; according to legend, at the moment of Augustine's baptism by St. Ambrose of Milan the two men extemporized one of the great hymns of the church, “Te Deum laudamus" (We praise thee. O God). Thus he wavered “between the danger that lies in gratifycan accrue from singing.” Uliing the senses and the benefits which... mately, of course, music secured a place in Christian life. Throughout the church's history, however, music has developed within a state of constant tension in which the imaginative and progressive contributions of musicians are held in check to some degree by the severer concerns of churchmen.

The Jewish Heritage

The earliest Christian worship and music naturally came from the Jewish tradition of the apostolic church of the first centuries rather than from pagan Hellenism, Although Judaism did not have a theoretical and philosophical literature to match that of the Greeks, it had as rich a musical tradition as any religion. The exhortations in the Psalms to praise God with songs and musical instruments provide ample evidence of this O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth: break forth into joyous song and sing praises! Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody! With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! (Ps. 98:1, 4-6)

The Early Christian Period

13

Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with timbrel and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! (Ps. 150; 3-5)

The power of music over the human mind was also part of Jewish experi-

ence. The first book of Samuel reports the therapeutic effect of David's harp playing on the troubled King Saul (1 Sam. 16:23). (Fig, 2.1)

Jewish synagogue worship contained several types of worship activities, mostly based on scripture. These included prayer, readings and teaching, and the giving of alms. All these features were carried over into Christian practice The Jewish religious musical repertory comprised both scriptural and

nonscriptural songs. The scriptural songs included the psalms (from the Book

of Psalms) and other poetic passages from the religious writings, known as canticles. Since the Christian Old Testament retained the Jewish scriptures, the

psalms and canticles were naturally retained as well. (Fig. 2.2) The nonscriptural songs were hymns, a simpler and more popular genre than the psalms and canticles. Vestiges of the Jewish hymns and their music certainly survived into Christian repertoire, but since they did not have biblical authority they rapidly gave way to newly composed hymns embodying the Christian faith.

The musical style of early Christian music was derived from that of Judaism. The texture of the music was monophonic, although actual performance presumably involved doublings and heterophonic ornamentations. Rhythm was not metered but controlled in general by word rhythms. There were three different means of performing, The simplest was direct performance, which consisted of solo or unison performance of the music throughout. Also common was responsorial singing, in which a solo singer or leader performed verses of the text, and the entire congregation answered each verse with the following verse or with a response or refrain, Common responses were the simple Hebrew words amen (an expression of affirmation) and halleluja (praise Jahweh); but these might be more extensive O give thanks to the Lord for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever!

Let Israel say,

“His steadfast love endures for ever!”

Let the house of Aaron say,

“His steadfast love endures for ever!”

Let those who fear the Lord say, “His steadfast love endures for ever!”

(Ps. 118: 1-4)

Figure 2.1 Lorenzo Monaco, “King David” (ca. 1410). King David, to whom many of the psalms are attributed, was depicted not only with the harp but with a variety of other musical instruments by medieval artists. Here he holds a psaltery (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gwynne Andrews and Marquand Funds, and Gift of Mrs. RalphJ. Hines, by exchange, 1965. (65.14.4))

chlignas demuon odie

aillodit onus anmasGy tum Grover te nant woarous

Figure 2.2 Medieval manuscript illumination showing church singers at a lectern decorating the first letter of Psalm 98, “Cantate Domino canticum novum” (O sing to the Lorda new song). (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Lyell empt. 4, fol. 133v)

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Chapter 2

Given the structure of psalms in paired verses, it was possible to divide the singers into two groups and have them sing in alternation. Such performance

is termed antiphonal. Direct, responsorial, and antiphonal singing continued in christian musical practice.

The pitch organization of Jewish music was quite different from that of the

Greeks and from our familiar scales. It relied on the principle of modes or melodic formulas.

The basic units were not individual notes considered as

abstract points in tonal space but melodic outlines or prototypes serving as

patterns for actual sung phrases. In some cases it appears that the early Chris-

tans adopted the melodies themselves. More importantly, however, the principle of melodic construction based on modes became the basis for the music of the church for at least the first ten centuries of its existence.

The Diversification of Practice

In the centuries following the Edict of Milan, Europe gradually became Christianized; but as the religious faith spread, its worship and musical practices diversified. Decentralization of political power led to the formation of smaller, loosely organized nations. Because the means of communication were slow and unreliable, it was difficult to disperse any uniform repertoire or style throughout the continent. Growing pains within the church itself led to a variety of theological opinions associated with different spiritual leaders. Some positions were absorbed into the dogma of the church, while others were rejected as heretical. In this context it is not surprising that the musical tradition was extremely fragmented The Eastern Influence

The strongest political, cultural, and musical center was the eastern portion of Christendom, centered in the new capital of the Roman Empire at Constantinople, or Byzantium, to use its traditional name (now Istanbul). The Emperor Constantine had made the city his imperial capital in 330, so that while the Catholic Church remained centered around the pope, the bishop of Rome, an eastern branch of the church grew up in Byzantium. This branch produced the modern Orthodox Church The relative stability of the Byzantine empire, which for a thousand years staved off one attack after another from the outside, permitted the development of a highly sophisticated culture. In politics this manifested itself in a system of court intrigue that led to the modem connotation of the epithet Byzantine. In Byzantium the Emperor Justinian (483-565) achieved a monumental and intricate codification of the Roman imperial law. He also ordered the building of the great church of Hagia Sophia. (Fig. 2.3) Religious thinkers reveled in the pursuit of arcane details of theology.

The Early Christian Period

17

Figure 2.3 Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (earlier Constantinople and Byzantium), the greatest church of the Byzantine era, It was built in the reign of the great emperor Justinian (r. 527-565), a time when Constantinople exerted ecclesiastical political, and artistic domination over Europe. Following the Turkish conquest of the city in 1453, Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque. (Marburg/Art Resource)

It should not be surprising that in this context the Byzantine church developed a repertoire of elaborate, extended musical compositions. Particularly impressive was the huge repertoire of perhaps a hundred thousand or more hymns. There werea number of special types of musical pieces to ornament worship. Characteristic of the spirit of Byzantine music, the kontakion (pl. kontakia) resembled a long, poetic sermon on a biblical text. Each kontakion contains a prologue (prooimion) and twenty or more long stanzas, linked by a shared refrain. Equally grandiose is the kanon (pl, kanones), a complicated, multisectional piece based on a series of nine biblical canticles. For each canticle, a kanon provides a so-called ode consisting of several stanzas The style of the music could be as complex as the repertoire was extensive The performance of these pieces was, of course, conceived as monophonic, but they were by no means simple. The kontakia and kanones were oniginally

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Chapter 2

syllabic, but they developed an elaborate, florid style called kalophonic (beautiful sounding), actually a number of different styles of embellishment associated with individual musicians. This, of course, reflects the general melodic tendencies of much Middle Eastern and oriental music. By the eighth century, the theoretical tonal structure of Byzantine church music was modal; that is, an actual piece of music was based on a given melodic formula. In this it resembled Jewish and other Eastern musical styles. The melodic formula was known as an echos (pl. echoi). The complete system incorporated eight different echoi, classified in two series of four. In each series the formulas were oriented respectively around the pitch centers d, ¢, f, and g. This system strongly influenced the development of the music theory of western Europe in the Middle Ages

Local European Practices After the fourth century, the churches and monasteries in the different parts of Europe developed a number of local musical idioms. Before we turn our attention to the great centralized musical repertoire that dominated the Middle

Ages, a brief note of the evidence of the diversity of the early church is in order The religious and musical tradition of Rome itself is commonly termed Old Roman.

It continued as an oral tradition well into the Middle Ages, when

a suitable notation was developed, consequently, a substantial quantity of Old Roman music is available for modern scholars to study and compare to the related, but significantly different, music of the later Catholic church. By comparison, much less is known about the musical repertoires and styles of the “peripheral” regions of northern and western Europe

St Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, was a musical leader in the early church. He is credited with promoting the singing of hymns as a means of strengthening faith and fortifying belief in the true doctrines of the Christian religion. He actually composed the texts of several great hymns, though probably not their music. The music and worship practice that was used in Milan is called Ambrosian in his honor.

Like the Old Roman,

the

Ambrosian repertoire was eventually notated

In Ireland, one of the first areas almost entirely converted to Christianity,

there was a Celtic musical tradition associated with the monasteries founded

by St. Patrick in the fifth century. It did not last past the seventh century, and none of the actual music is known today. Between the sixth and eighth centuries, the Frankish territory, consisting

of what is now western France and the Netherlands, also developed a local

musical idiom, called Gallican. Of the various “peripheral” styles it was un-

doubtedly the one with the most influence on the later, unified repertoire of

the Middle Ages, but the lack of surviving music makes it impossible to determine the nature and extent of the relationship.

The Early Christian Period

19

The Christians living in the Iberian region (Portugal and Spain) during the domination of the Moors from the eighth to the eleventh centuries were known as Mozarabs. The surviving musical manuscripts of the Mozarabic (or Hispanic) tradition are mostly undecipherable Out of this diversity of regional political, social, religious, philosophical, and artistic forces, the Middle Ages emerged. The construction of a relatively unified European civilization from the wreckage of Greek and Roman culture was the achievement of the leaders, thinkers, artists, and musicians from the sixth century on. Music holds a proud position in that civilization:

Questions for Reflection

‘> How did the Judaeo-Christian tradition justify theologically the importance of music in its worship? @ How did the texts that were sung in Jewish and early Christian worship reflect the needs of an unnotated musical tradition? What relationships were there between differences in chant traditions and the articulation of national cultural integrity in the early church? How did the continuously expanding church deal with the differences of musical styles among peoples to whom it spread?

Suggestions for Further Reading

The discussion of music in St. Augustine's Confessions and some writings of other church fathers are translated in Oliver Strunk’s Source Readings (see Suggestions for Further Reading in Chapter 1). For other sources of the early church’s thought about music, see James W. McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) On the Jewish musical tradition, see A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: Schocken, 1967). The standard study of Byzantine chant is Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnody, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)

Notes

L Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans, RS. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), 239.

THE CHANT OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

The Establishment of a Catholic Tradition

One of the great accomplishments of the early Middle Ages was the establishment of a unified Europe on religious and political grounds. An important product of that unification was the development of the musi-

cal repertoire commonly known as “Gregorian” chant. It takes this name from Pope Gregory I, who led the Roman church from 590 to 604. As far as can be determined Gregory did not actually compose any of the

music, His reputation derived from his consolidation of ecclesiastical authority in Rome and the assertion of the church's power in worldly affairs.

Pope Gregory came from a political background and was a remarkably capable administrator; he was responsible for sending out mission-

aries who spread not only the Christian faith but also its musical practice

throughout Europe. Within the realm of worship and music, Gregory's contributions included the recodification of the parts of the service, the

reorganization of the schola cantorum (school of singing, the papal choir),

and the cultivation of vocal instruction in Roman institutions to train

singers to lead the church’s music and thereby free priests for other

duties.

It is important to remember that music was transmitted orally. The

earliest surviving manuscripts with reasonably precise musical notation

for the chant date from the end of the ninth century. Like all oral tradi-

tions in music, the chant required concentration on a nucleus of simple, fundamental melodic designs, while at the same time it naturally varied from place to place, generation to generation, and singer to singer.

21

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Chapter 3

The establishment of a single, universal body of church music actually came later, at the time of Charlemagne (ca, 742-814). It was a natural corollary of the attempt to unify the European continent politically, in a sense a propaganda move. Charlemagne well understood the need to base his secular power on the support of the church, and when Pope Leo II was threatened, Charlemagne came to his rescue. Leo in turn crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day in 800. Partly because of the importance of centering the Catholic musical practice in Rome and partly because of the musical taste of Charlemagne and his father Pepin, the new worship service and music were grounded in the practice described in books sent north from Rome. The compilation of the entire repertoire was directed by the scholar Alcuin (ca. 732-804), who was in charge of the school at Charlemagne’s court in Aachen (Fig, 3.1), and elements of the Gallican practice were also assimilated into the final product. In support of the authenticity of this music over the existing regional styles, the legend grew up that Pope Gregory 1 himself had composed the music under divine inspiration, The Roman Liturgy

The prescribed order for the conduct of worship is called the liturgy. An understanding of the Roman church's liturgy is essential for any understanding of the chant, because the liturgy provides both the context and the shaping plan for the musical expression of chant The Roman liturgy can be regarded as the largest unified artistic experience possible, for it encompasses the entire year and is reenacted as a great symbolic ritual each year in a subtly changing but never-ending cycle. Consequently every piece of the chant has its particular place or places within space and time provided by architectural settings and within a gigantic liturgical form, Each day in the liturgical year is unique; the form and content of its music are based on its relationship to the two greatest days in the church yeat—Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Christ and is fixed on 25 December in the Western church, and Easter, which celebrates Christ's resurrection on a movable date in the spring—and to other feasts. (Fig, 3.2) The liturgical year actually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which marks the beginning of the season of Advent, the period when the church anticipates the coming of Christ. Advent is the first of two penitential seasons in the liturgical year, which are traditionally marked by prayer, selfexamination, and fasting, as well as by relatively austere music and worship. The celebration of Christmastide begins on Christmas day itself and continues for the next twelve days. Then follows Epiphany, the day when the visit of the Magi to the child Jesus is commemorated, and its season, which signifies the

The Chant of the Medieval Church

23

Figure 3.1 The Palatine Chapel of Charlemagne at Aachen. Aachen was Charlemagne’s capital, and the chapel contained his throne. The architecture represents the imposing, weighty style of the ninth century. (Marburg/Art Resource) manifestation of Christ to the whole world. Epiphany ends with the beginning of Lent, the second of the penitential seasons, which consists of the forty days before Easter. The last week before Easter is known as Holy Week. Easter is the most important festival of the year, since it marks the resurrection of Christ The Easter season lasts seven weeks and ends on the Sunday known as Pentecost (fifty days after Easter) or Whitsunday. On Pentecost the church celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit to the apostles (Acts 2). Then comes Trinity Sunday and the long season of Trinity, continuing through the summer and

24

Chapter 3 Christmas CHRISTMAS Typ,

All Saints! Day

Holy Week Easter

Michaelmas

Pentecost Trinity Sunday

Corpus Christi

Figure 3.2 The liturgical year, showing the seasons and some of the major festivals of the church

fall until the arrival of the first Sunday of Advent and the start ofa new church year There are numerous other festivals in the church, notably St. Stephen's day, the day after Christmas; Corpus Christi, the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday: Michaelmas, 29 September; and All Saints’ Day, 1 November. Because the exact date of Easter changes from year to year, it was necessary to establish a complicated hierarchy of celebrations in cases when two liturgical days fell on the same date. The liturgical calendar may seem strange to modern students, but it need not be thought of as totally foreign. Indeed, some of our familiar secular holidays are based on the liturgical calendar. Mardi Gras (French for “fat Tuesday"), the last day of the season of Epiphany, arose as a “last fling” before the long season of fasting that begins with Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Ash Wednesday is a church holiday (ie., holy day); Mardi Gras is definitely not. Similarly Halloween (All Hallows Eve) is the night before All Saints’

The Chant of the Medieval Church

25

Day (or All Hallows), All Saints’ Day is a church holiday; Halloween probably has its roots in the Celtic pagan observance of the beginning of winter.

Settings for Worship Within the Roman liturgy for each day there are two different settings for worship: a relatively private one known as the Divine Office, which is observed by the cloistered community in a monastery or convent; and a public one, the Mass.

Divine Office The Divine Office has its roots in the Jewish synagogue services and early Christian night vigils from the centuries when the church was still suffering Roman persecution. The standardization of monastic worship, like the governance of monastic life and work in general, was established by

the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict (ca. 480-527) set out detailed regulations to

order every aspect of the activities of the monks. The Rule prescribed eight services that articulated the day of study and work, the Divine Office or Ca-

nonical Hours. The daily schedule ran approximately as follows: Matins (morning)—2:00 am. (The ever-practical Rule of St. Benedict suggests that “When they arise for the Divine Office, they ought to encourage

each other, for the sleepy make many excuses.” Private study and prayer Lauds (praise) —5:00 a Prime (the first Hour)—6:00 am Breakfast (if any)

Private study

Possibly Mass

Work begins

Terce (the third Hour)—9:00

am

Return to work Sext (the sixth Hour)—12:00 noon

Return to work None (the ninth Hour)—3:00 pw.

Dinner. According to the Benedictine Rule, there would normally be only two dishes, and each monk would have a ration ofa pound of bread

for the entire day. Only the infirm were allotted red meat Private study and prayer

Vespers (evening) —4:00 rat

Compline (complete)—5:00 rx Bed—6:00 rm

26

Chapter 3

Obviously worship was an important part of the monastic vocation. The monks dedicated themselves not only to charitable work but also to a career of worship The named Offices (Matins, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline) are called the Greater Hours, and their music is more extensive and more complicated and more important to music history than that of the numbered or lesser hours (Prime, Terce, Sext, and None). The book containing the music of the Offices is the Antiphonary, that containing only the texts is the Breviary. Medieval scribes prepared beautifully decorated breviaries (also known as Books of Hours) for wealthy patrons; among these are some of the most elaborate and famous examples of manuscript illumination, The musical content of the Offices centers on the singing of psalms; the number of these ranges from three for the Lesser Hours to nine at Matins. The psalms are set off by nonbiblical pieces (the antiphons and responsories). Except for Matins, each of the Greater Hours climaxes with a canticle. For Vespers the canticle is the Magnificat or Song of Mary (Luke 1:46—55, beginning “My soul magnifies the Lord”), and for Compline it is appropriately the Song of Simeon Nunc dimittis (Luke 2:29-32, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace”). There is also a hymn in each Office. Besides these elements there are opening and closing formulas, brief passages from the Bible, and prayers. The Offices include neither preaching nor Holy Communion. The entire service does not last long, perhaps fifteen minutes for the Lesser Hours and up to half an hour or a bit more for the Greater Hours on major feast days. Mass

The Mass is the most solemn service of the liturgy. Like the Divine

Office, the Mass originated in the Jewish worship practice, combining the

synagogue teaching tradition with the celebration of Holy Communion (also known as the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper), derived from the rite of the Jewish Passover. The Mass therefore has two parts. The first part, or teaching service, concludes after the sermon, if there is one, and the statement of the Christian faith in the Nicene Creed (known in music as the Credo). The second consists of Holy Communion. In the early days of the church, the teaching service was open to inquirers who were not yet baptized Christians, and they were excused when the faithful prepared for the Eucharist The essential structure of the Mass was established in a more-or-less unified pattern much later than that of the Offices, in fact, not until the tenth century. The book that contains the music for the Mass is known as the Gradual; the book that contains the text is called the Missal. For general use, the most important materials were later collected from the vast total repertoire into the more practical Liber usualis An important structuring principle in the liturgy is the division of material into those parts of the text that always remain the same and those that change according to the particular day in the liturgical year. The former are called

The Chant of the Medieval Church

27

Ordinary, and the latter are known as Proper. In the Offices of Vespers and

Compline, for example, the canticles are Ordinary, because these texts are

sung every day; the psalms, which change according to the church calendar,

are Proper. The same holds true for the Mass. (Figure 3.3) In this case, the

parts of the service that were originally intended to be sung by the entire congregation are always the same, or Ordinary; the Proper tended to be reserved for the choir and solo singers. Historically the Mass Proper is older and

more closely tied to the texts of the scripture than the Ordinary. In later periods in music history the term Mass often refers to a musical setting of the

five movements of the Mass Ordinary only, for the practical reason that composers generally wrote only the Ordinary and left the Proper, with its relatively limited usefulness, to the traditional chant.

The complete Mass forms an effective artistic as well as religious experience. Like most large art works, it has a clear shape with well-placed climaxes

and distinctly articulated segments. Its structure can be understood in two main divisions: the teaching service and the Eucharist, and these are subdi-

vided into two and three smaller groups of movements, respectively. In the following outline, we shall show this organization, noting which elements

belong to the Ordinary and which to the Proper (see also Fig. 3.3)

Within the first half of the Mass, the first subgroup of movements forms

a brief opening ceremony. This starts with the singing of the Introit, or intro-

ductory psalm verse, proper to the day, framed by two statements of a brief independent piece known as an antiphon. Then comes the first pair of movements of the Ordinary, the plea for forgiveness Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy—the only part of the Mass that continued to be sung in Greek after the

early days of the church) and the song of praise Gloria in excelsis (Glory to God

in the highest) The next portion of the Mass contains the instruction of the congregation

through scripture and sometimes a sermon. This part of the service opens with the Collect or prayer for the day, which is not sung but read or intoned by the priest, the congregation responding “Amen.” The Proper assigns each day two

scripture readings. The first reading is an Epistle selection taken from the New

Testament. It is followed by the singing of a responsorial Gradual (from the

Latin word gradus, meaning “step,” because that is where the solo singer

stands), and Alleluia, which includes a psalm verse. The Gradual and Alleluia, which have the most elaborate music of the Mass, form the service's musical

climax. Then the second reading, the Gospel, follows. After the Gospel there

may bea sermon, but this is optional. The whole first part of the Mass closes with the singing of the Credo (I believe in one God), the third musical move-

ment of the Mass Ordinary.

The second half of the Mass begins with the offering of the Eucharistic bread and wine. A musical Offertory is sung, followed by the saying of prayers and the Twenty-fifth Psalm. Then the priest says a silent prayer known as the Secret.

28

Chapter 3 Jp

ore-Mass

Eucharist

Introit RYRIL ELELSON GLORIA

(Collect) Epistle)

IN-EXCELSIS

Gradual Allleluia—replaced in penitential seasons by the Tract, and followed on certain

occasions by the Sequence

Offertory

(Prayers) (PSALM 25)

(Secret) (Preface) SANCTUS (CANON) (PATER NOSTER) AGNUS DEI

Communion

(Gospel)

(PRAYERS)

CRI

(Postcommunion) BENEDICTIO:

—

Figure 3.3

‘The structure of the Mass. The parts of the Ordinary are shown in capitals, the Proper in lower case. (Sections spoken or intoned rather than sung are indicated by parentheses.) Between two prayers—the Preface, which belongs to the Proper and is

intoned aloud, and the Canon, which is Ordinary and is said silently by the

priest—comes the singing of the fourth musical movement of the Ordinary, the Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy) ‘The actual partaking of Holy Communion forms the liturgical climax and

conclusion of the Mass.

The Pater noster (“Our father’—the Lord's Prayer) is

intoned, followed by the singing of the Ordinary Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”)

A Proper movement appropriately called Communion is then sung. After the Communion come prayers, the Postcommunion prayer, and finally the Benediction, which is sung. There are only two forms for the Benediction, so it can be

regarded as belonging to the music of the Ordinary, but it is so brief that it has. rarely been included in compositions of the Mass. Curiously, it is one of these

simple formulas,

“Ite, missa est,” (Go, it is dismissed) that gave the service its

name, in Latin Missa and, of course, Mass in English

Under special circumstances the form of the Mass may vary somewhat.

The Gloria is omitted during penitential seasons, and during Lent the position usually occupied by the celebrative Alleluia is taken by a more somber movement called the Tract. An even more substantial variant is the Mass for the

Dead or Requiem Mass, so called from the text of its introit, Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine (Give them eternal rest, O Lord).

The Chant of the Medieval Church

29

Aesthetic Considerations Regarding the Chant

In order to gain a genuine understanding of any music, it is necessary to imagine it in the context for which it was intended. This is perhaps even more

strongly the case for the chant than for other music in our cultural heritage.

The chant is distant enough in time from the music that we are accustomed to

hearing that it seems foreign. On the one hand, it is simpler than the polyphonic music and stylized forms that govern more familiar styles; on the other hand, its principles and the concepts on which it is based are quite sophisticated, although they are different from those of later music

That much of this music appears at first somewhat austere should not

surprise us, since we know that it belongs in the framework of the liturgy. We must remember that the church fathers, including St. Augustine, were greatly concerned that the music should not distract from the worshipper’s medita-

tion on God. To answer this concern, the music eschews virtuosic display that would force the singer to concentrate on the problems of performing and seduce the listener's attention from the music to the singer. Similarly, the

spiritual rather than physical focus of the service calls fora style that does not encourage a physical rhythmic response such as clapping or toe tapping The early church fathers were also particularly concerned that the music

not obscure the words of the chant.

However, the style of the chant is not

merely adapted to the communication of its texts but also closely dependent

on the text for its musical structure. The single-line texture of the music allows

the words to come through unimpeded, and, as our analysis will show, the rising and falling inflections of the speaking voice and the grammatical struc-

ture of language actually define the music.

The single-line texture of the chant and the suitability of the music for

singers of modest technical qualifications bear special significance. The unity

of the “community of believers” finds expression in the uniting of voices in a single statement, especially within the religious cloister. Thus the monophonic

texture of the chant serves as a symbol of an idea: its simplicity should not by any means be regarded as evidence of primitiveness.

Another aspect of the context in which the chant was sung is the architecture of the churches where it was performed. During the Gregorian and Carolingian periods churches were still somewhat weighty in construction, embodying more solidity than lightness and reflecting firmness of faith rather than soaring ecstasy. The music of the chant has a corresponding sense of gravity and solemnity.

Purely physical aspects of early church architecture offered both problems and opportunities for music. Acoustically, the open space in the nave or cen-

tral body of the church presented a very “live” environment for music, and

30

Chapter 3

hard stone and wood surfaces set up considerable reverberation. This meant that the simple texture of the chant easily filled the space in which it was sung. indeed the sound ina very resonant room could become blurred in detail but produce an audible atmosphere similar in effect to the incense wafted from the thurible in the Mass. The actual design of the space and the placement or movernent of singers could also be exploited in the performance of the chant Processions were, of course, a significant part of the action of worship, and the division of the singers into two groups facing each other in the choir reinforced the effect of antiphonal singing The Musical Style of the Chant

‘The chant was intended to be performed by unaccompanied solo and choral male voices in unison, though undoubtedly in actual practice there were other possibilities. Boys often sang with men, using octave doubling, and in convents of nuns the women could sing the services. The existence of documents by church authorities banning instruments from churches implies that ad libitum performance on instruments also took place Within the hmits of unison singing, variety in sound was achieved by doubling and by contrasting direct, antiphonal, and responsorial performance. Hymns and the chants of the Mass Ordinary were sung in direct fashion. Psalms and the antiphons that framed and articulated them were performed anuphonally. Responsorial chanting increased as more elaborate music developed, and we shall see that the solo portions of responsorial pieces provided a fruitful field for musical experimentation We do not have any clear notational evidence of measured rhythm in the style of the chant, but this does not mean that there was no rhythm in the music. The rhythm of the singing derived from that of the spoken language. In Greek and Latin dynamic syllable stress did not contribute to. grammar or expression. Syllables fell into the categories long and short, and the linguistic phrase flowed smoothly from beginning to end without the lumpiness that accents give to modern English and German. As a consequence, the musical phrase also flowed smoothly, and the absence of rhythmic meter should be regarded as a natural effect of the language itself. An important concept in understanding the chant is that the basic musical unit of the chant was originally not the note but the phrase. In the following, discussion we must constantly keep in mind that the idea of single pitches as independent, abstract building blocks for the construction of musical pieces arose only after the repertoire was already well established. This will not only help us appreciate the authentic character of the chant but also explain the nature of later musical composition.

The Chant of the Medieval Church

31

The melodic style of the chant was, of course, always guided by the intention of vocal performance. The music proceeds gracefully, without large leaps, and unfolds within a moderate range. The phrase shapes reflect the grammar and inflections of natural speech by rising and falling to parallel the sound and sense of the texts. We can identify three distinct melodic types, used for different types of pieces. The first and simplest melody type is formed by the recitation tones. Used for readings and prayers, these formulas allow the singer to cover long passages clearly and efficiently. They reflect speech patterns in a very simple sense. The pitch contour is almost completely monotone, broken only by the use of a few small upward or downward inflectionsat punctuations in the text. Next in simplicity are the psalm tones. Employed specifically for singing the verses of the psalms, they can be applied to any psalm text. They are not unlike the recitation tones, but they give a more exaggerated depiction of speech inflection (see Ex. 3.1), The psalm begins with a rising gesture called the initium or intonation. This brings the voice to a pitch at which the bulk of the verse will be chanted, called the tenor (from the Latin tenere, to hold). The

punctuation in the middle of the verse produces another little melodic gesture,

the mediatio or mediant, which leaves the line suspended on the tenor. (In cases

of clear punctuation before the mediant there is an optional dip from the tenor known as the flex.) The second half of the verse begins on the tenor, and the verse concludes with a descending figure, the terminatio, or termination, The

second and succeeding verses of the psalm start directly on the tenor, omitting the intonation. Other chants have more freedom in their melodic construction, with a

variety of phrase shapes and greater flexibility in contour. Most of the phrases are arch-shaped or descending curves, so that a grammatical phrase ending is indicated by a downward inflection. Much of the repertoire is constructed from a few archetypal phrases with characteristic beginning, central, and ending functions, each phrase adapted as necessary to the words of that particular moment in the text. This process is known as centonization. We have noted several times the essential connection between the text

and music in the chant, It is also important to consider the manner in which the syllables were matched to the music (text underlay). The simplest procedure is to move quickly through the text without changing pitch on any

syllable; such a setting is called syllabic. Syllabic text setting is naturally used

for music intended to be sung by untrained singers or by large groups such as entire congregations. Itis also the most efficient way of handling long texts. As a result, a long movement of the Mass Ordinary, for example the Credo, is generally set syllabically. The opposite procedure is melismatic, that is, a single syllable stretches through a considerable amount of melodic motion.

Pieces

with short texts and chants intended for soloists or trained choristers are more

likely to be set melismatically.

32

Chapter 3 The musical forms of the chant are quite varied. There are strophic forms

in the hymns, for example, where the text comprises a series of identically structured stanzas that are sung to the same music. A related special case is the

singing of the psalm tones. A few of the liturgical texts suggest symmetrical

musical forms. For example, the complete text of the Kyrie of the Mass reads Kyrie eleison Lord, have mercy Kyrie eleison Lord, have mercy Lord, have mercy Kyrie eleison Christe eleison Christ, have mercy Christe elewson Christ, have mere Christe eleison Christ, have mercy Kyrie eleison Lord, have mercy Kyrie eleison Lord have mercy Kyrie eleison Lord, have mercy

The musical settings of this text sometimes, though not always, adopt a ternary or ABA structure. Most chants have rather free forms. These are often motivically unified by the recurrence of variants of a few model phrases in irregular arrangements, the result of the process of centonization mentioned earlier. The Music Theory of the Chant

In the course of the centuries, liturgical music grew in quantity and complexity. At the same time the church recognized that teaching singers by rote led to alterations of the sacred repertoire through the natural process of oral transmission. Moreover, it was obvious that it would be desirable to have more

efficient ways of teaching singers to master their extensive repertoire than simply through painstaking memorization. From these concerns and needs came a system of theory and musical notation To gain control over such a vast body of material as the chant repertoire, church musicians needed some method of classification. This meant that they

had to examine individual pieces in detail and, consequently, to identify sepa-

rate pitches and their relationships. The reemergence of some of the treatises of ancient Greek music theory, which relied on the identification of individual

pitches, helped facilitate the creation of a new pitch system that ultimately

developed into the theory of the church or ecclesiastical modes. An important early accomplishment was the definition of the psalm tones.

By carefully considering the melodies and perhaps regularizing some subtle

The Chant of the Medieval Church

33

differences between closely related variants, the theorists identified nine basic formulas that were in use. The first eight were numbered and grouped in pairs according to their pitch configurations; that is, psalm tones 1 and 2 share some elements of whole-step and half-step arrangement, as do psalm tones 3 and 4, and so on. Those in each pair differ in the placement of the tenor. The ninth psalm tone was named the Tonus peregrinus (pilgrim, or wandering, tone); it differs from all the other psalm tones because it adopts a new tenor after its mediant. The psalm tones can be summarized in modern notation as shown in Example 3.1 Example 3.1 The psalm tones, The nine tones are shown with their components identified. In some cases a tone has a number of different possible terminations, but only one for each has been included here.

Intonation

1

2%

Tenor with flex

Mediant

Fe ee

,ee

Tenor

Termination

ee

oes

ee

This arrangement of the psalm tones into four pairs was undoubtedly influenced by the eight echoi of Byzantine chant (which, however, were organized into two groups of four). Thus the formulation of the medieval modes combined the theoretical traditions of Greek classical theory with Judaeo-Christian practice

34

Chapter 3

By experience singers discovered that the melodies of certain antiphons linked naturally with some psalm tones and not with others. Examining the details of the pitch pattems in the various antiphons and comparing them to the eight numbered psalm tones, theorists were able to classify the antiphons in a system parallel to the psalm tones. The melodic patterns came to be known as the modes which were used to classify any free chants in the repertoire The most important characteristics of a chant were (1) its cadential tone

or final, (2) the tone around which its melodic curves generally oriented themselves (the equivalent of the tenor of a psalm tone, but more heavily decorated by melodic motion) or dominant, and (3) the melody’s general tessitura or ambitus (always an approximation).

Like the psalm tones, the modes were

numbered and grouped in four pairs. Modes 1 and 2 share the same final, d,

but differ in their dominant and their ambitus; similarly, modes 3 and 4 share

the final e, modes 5 and 6 both have fas their final, and modes 7 and 8 close on g. The dominants and the ambiti of the odd-numbered modes, the authentic

modes, are higher than those of their even-numbered partners, which are called plagal. The following table summarizes the characteristics of the eight modes:

Mode

Final

Dominant

1 (authentic)

d

a

3 (authentic)

e

c

5 (authentic)

£

e

6 (plagal)

f

a

2 (plagal)

4 (plagal)

7 (authentic) 8 (plagal)

d e g 2

f

Ambitus

d-d’

Aca

a

qd e

Several features of the system are worth noting: 1. The dominant of each authentic mode is generally a fifth above the final, except for mode 3. The dominant of each plagal mode is a third below the dominant of its corresponding authentic mode, except for mode 8. This reflects a hesitancy about the pitches b and b-flat in the Middle Ages, The pitch b would produce an awkward tritone from f, while the substitution of b-flat would result in a tritone from e. The pitch was, in fact, adjusted in perfor-

mance according to its context, but as a result it seems to have been regarded as unsuitable for a dominant. Consequently, in modes 3 and 8, where to be consistent the dominant would be b, c’ was substituted.

The Chant of the Medieval Church

35

2. The ambitus of each mode is given as an octave, but in practice the melodies often extend beyond that ambitus. Usually the extension takes the form of a lower neighbor to the final in the authentic modes and of an upper neighbor above the given top note in the plagals, When there is a very wide range, the mode can be considered a “mixed mode,” combining authentic and plagal. 3, There was no standard of absolute pitch; therefore the note names given here indicate only relative pitch. A melody could be sung at any comfortable level. The next step in making the singers’ task easier was to develop a music

notation so that they could read the chant rather than having to memorize the

music for the entire liturgical year. The first stage was to make sketchy upward, downward, level, arched, wavelike, or zigzag marks in the spaces be-

tween the lines of text to remind the singers, who certainly already knew the melodies well, of the general direction of the melodic line. These notations

were called neumes, and the term continued to be used generically for the signs

that indicated pitches throughout the Middle Ages. (Fig. 3.4) The use of neumes seems to date from about the eighth century, corresponding to the

attempt to catholicize the Roman chant.

The church musicians soon made progress in the accuracy of pitch indica-

tion by using neumes of different sizes, placed at different heights above the

words. Such heighted neumes gave the singer not only an idea of the direction

of the melodic gesture but also a sense of the scope of the gesture and of how high or low a particular figure lay in the total range. Even so, the indication remained rather vague. Eventually the musicians scratched two straight horizontal lines in the space where the neumes were to be placed, one indicating the note f and the other the note c’, and the details of the melodic contour grew still clearer.

Later the f line was drawn in red ink and the c’ line in yellow or green, an

attractive predecessor of clefs. In the eleventh century the addition of two

more lines became common, and the use of letter names at the left edge of the

c’ or f lines completed the development of the staff and clefs used for chant

notation.

To indicate precise locations of pitches on the staff, the neumes evolved from their old, rather cursive style to a form in which small squares with or

without tails were placed on the lines and spaces of the staff. These square neumes could be combined with one another or with chains of diamond

shapes, forming compound neumes or ligatures. They might also have

hooklike appendages (plica) or other ornamental components (e.g., the quil-

isma, which looks rather like the more familiar zigzag sign for a short trill) The standardization of the four-line staff appears to have been the accomplishment of a theorist and teacher named Guido of Arezzo,

who worked in

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| Figure 3.4 A music manuscript showing neumes of the eleventh century. (Bodletan Library, Oxford Ms.

Bodley

775,

fol.

125r)

The Chant of the Medieval Church

37

the first half of the eleventh century. Guido also contributed to music education a system for teaching sight-singing. He either discovered or created a melody fora particular hymn, “Ut queant laxis,” in which the first six phrases began on consecutively higher pitches, each separated by a whole tone except the third and fourth, which were only a semitone apart. The syllables corresponding to those pitches were Ut, Re-, Mi-, Fa-, Sol-, and La-; the entire pattern of six tones formed a hexachord. Guido taught his students to read the notes of any chant by thinking of the pitches and syllables of the hexachord The system is called solmization after the fifth and third hexachord syllables, (It

is still in use, of course, except that the first syllable is now sung as do instead of ut.) The hexachord worked well for the pitches from c toa, but then a problem

arose. Guido solved this by having his students start with that hexachord, called the “natural” hexachord, and pivot on sol (g) to a new hexachord, beginning there with ut and thus extending the total range to e’. The process of pivoting from one hexachord to another was called mutation. To go still

higher one could apply mutation again on c' to produce a natural hexachord an octave above the first, reaching from c’ to a’, which was about as high as a chant was likely to go. Reversing the process, one could reach to the bottom of the practical range by treating the note c not as ut but as fa in a hexachord that went down to G. A hexachord made by mutation from fa to ut produced a hexachord that reached from fto d’. Obviously the importance of this hexachord was not to

increase the range of the system; rather its fa produced b-flat. Because the b-flat was written with a curved body, it was called b mollis (soft b), and thus a hexachord with ut on f was the “soft” hexachord. The b-natural was notated

with a square body and called b durum (hard b), so the hexachord based on g was a “hard” hexachord. To summarize Hard Soft Natural

ut

re

x

de

mi

ut

ut re

re mi fa

fa

sol

la

fe

w

BY

mi

fa sol sol la

la

ow

2

The notes of the complete vocal range used in the chant could now be identified as independent points in a scale beginning on G, known by the Greek letter gamma. Any individual pitch would be named by its letter name and the string of hexachord syllables that could be applied to it. As can be seen from the chart above, the pitch g would be G sol re ut, and the pitch a would

be A la mi re. The whole scale was named after the bottom note, gamma ut,

shortened to gamut. Ultimately the gamut was extended at the top all the way to e” (ela)

Guido concocted a way to drill his sight-singing students by pointing to

the joints of his left hand. Each joint represented a pitch in the gamut. An

38

Chapter 3

illustration of the

“Guidonian hand,” showing the names of the notes in their

places, became a common feature of medieval theory handbooks. (Fig. 3.5)

Two important points should be stressed in this summary of the develop-

ment of chant theory: First, the concepts developed by these early medieval

singers and singing teachers have lasted to the twentieth century and have become so ingrained that we take them for granted, an impressive achievement indeed. Second, all these inventions and developments resulted not from acoustical or philosophical abstractions but directly from the needs of church musicians who sought to gain control over their music. Both the concepts and

the tools sprang from the creative imaginations and intelligence of practical musicians constantly steeped in music itself.

Later Developments in the Liturgical Chant As the body of chant literature became more or less established, the creative

impulses of church musicians a role for the composer in a codified and assumed to be Composers therefore worked

sought new outlets. It became necessary to find situation in which the repertoire was already based on longstanding ecclesiastical authority. with the body of previously existing music, and

took as their task the amplification or glorification of the established chant.

The church’s music had evolved by the process of centonization. The

basic musical element had for centuries been the melody as a line rather than

discrete pitches. It was quite natural, then, that musical composition should

be based on already existing music.

A model for composition under these circumstances was ready to hand in the literary technique known as the gloss. Authors and scholars quite commonly worked from standard, “classic” texts, such as the scriptures or writ-

ings of ancient authors, providing not entirely original literature but running

commentary on the given text. The nature of this commentary varied from

grammatical analysis to elaboration of arguments, addition of details, and applications of principles. A gloss could be written as interlinear entries within a book, marginal notes, or extended discussions following brief statements extracted from the authority in question, (Plate 1)

The Trope

The musical application of the gloss principle to the chant produced the trope. A trope can be defined simply as the addition of words or music or both to an

existing chant. More specifically, one might add new words to melismatic

Figure 3.5

Guidonian hand, Such a diagram, showing the position of each pitch of the gamut on the hand, appeared in many treatises on music in the Middle Ages (The Bettmann Archive)

40

Chapter 3

passages of a chant, new melismatic material to relatively less complicated passages of text setting, or newly invented passages of words with their own music within an earlier piece. Added words expand or define the preexisting text, possibly to reflect a new theological understanding. The addition of music, by contrast, affects the expressive spirit of the piece, reflecting in the product a greater glorification of God in divine worship, not unlike the addition of embroidery, sculpture, or stained glass to decorate a church building It is important to note that this method of artistic creation, though it might seem limiting to modern musicians, was entirely characteristic of the medieval mind. It suited perfectly the concepts both of a universal, authoritative liturgy and of the use of melodic lines as the fundamental components of music The practice of troping the chant began in about the ninth century and continued to the twelfth. It was applied first to the antiphons of the Mass Proper and later to the Ordinary, when the responsibility for singing the Ordinary passed from the congregation to trained singers. The earliest tropes appear to have been introductory material to be placed before the main body of a chant, but eventually the additions appeared throughout the chant A special application of the troping principle was the Sequence, which became a complete, independent movement within the Mass. The term is derived from the Latin word meaning “to follow”; what it followed was the Alleluia of the Mass Proper. A ninth-century monk of the Abbey of St. Gall named Notker Balbulus (“Notker the Stammerer”) wrote that he had difficulty in memorizing the long, untexted melismas (called jubilus) that provided a flourish of praise at the ends of Alleluias. He discovered that when words were added to those melismas the notes became easier to learn. He therefore set himself the task of composing new, high-quality poems to be sung syllabically to the melismas. Such a new composition was sometimes called prosa Composers soon began to expand the Sequence texts into elaborately structured poetry and even to provide entirely new music, and thus they produced separate movements to follow the Alleluia as another component in the Mass Proper. Seizing their first real opportunity to experiment with musical form in a way that could not be done with the established body of chant music, the composers developed an abstract plan for the form of the Sequence by using rhymed pairs of lines that shared music in the pattern A BB CC DD and so on. The Sequence is thus a milestone in the history of musical form. One of the first important women composers, the abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), excelled in the composition of Sequences. Her Sequence texts are full of rich, mystical imagery, and her music is often quite original. Hildegard’s work is especially remarkable because she succeeded in a period in which music in general, and particularly the music of the church, was almost exclusively the domain of men The number of Sequences grew rapidly, until eventually there were over four thousand of them. This, of course, proved an unwieldy bulk of material

The Chant of the Medieval Church

41

for the singers and planners of the liturgy. Finally all but four—*Victimae paschali laudes,” attributed to Wipo of Burgundy (ca. 995-1050), for Easter; “Veni sancte spiritus,” attributed to Pope Innocent III (ca. 1160-1216), for Pentecost; “Lauda Sion,” attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-1274), for Corpus Christi; and “Dies irae,” by Thomas of Celano (thirteenth century), for the Requiem Mass—were abolished in the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) Liturgical Drama

Another result of the general practice of troping was the development of the liturgical drama. The medieval inclination to elaborate and thereby bring more glory to the service led, in about the tenth century, to the acting out of the sung

texts.

The earliest instance of this took place in the text of the chants that

recount the Easter story. The biblical narrative and, following it, the music in

question, took the form of a dialogue between the angels who guarded the tomb of Jesus and the women who came to anoint his body on the third day after his burial. It was perfectly natural to assign the performance to different

singers representing the interlocutors, (Fig. 3.6) By the end of the century, Ethelwold, the bishop of Winchester, had written detailed instructions for

acting out the dialogue in the Office of Matins on Easter morning, These constitute the first set of stage directions for a liturgical drama, including costumes and props, blocking and gestures, and notes for the actors about the way they should interpret the movement and the vocal performance to convey

emotion While the third lesson is read, four brothers robe themselves, one of

whom dressed in an alb enters as if for another purpose and discreetly goes to the place where the sepulchre is, and sits there quietly with a palm

in his hand. While the third response is being sung, the remaining three

come forward, every one dressed in a cope, carrying thuribles with incense in their hands, and hesitantly like people seeking something, come to the site of the sepulchre. For these things are performed in imitation of the angel sitting in the tomb, and of the women coming with spices to anoint Jesus's body,

Consequently when the one sitting there sees the

three nearing him, just like people straying about seeking something, he begins to sing sweetly in a moderate voice: Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, 0 Christicolae? [Whom do you seek in the tomb, o dwellers in Christ?]

When this has been sung all through, the three reply in unison Thesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicola, (The crucified Jesus of Nazaeth, o dweller in heaven.

_

=p + —_____¥

ft mommnenn ofte4

iuaita angls c13-t0t

hor motu.

Quen

wily micat fies mene 6 mfheole., J fil Bit.

:

Lee

+t

quenns ab cam

nic

ae

ba

ngfs




How important and effective was the establishment ofa Catholic musical

tradition for the political and ecclesiastical powers in the early Middle Ages? What was its relationship to the establishment of domination by other means

such as military or economic force? > How did the liturgical context for any particular piece of church music relate to the style of the piece? How did it affect the musician's or listener's

experience of the music?

“= Who actually sang each portion of the chant in the medieval liturgy? What effects did this have on the general relationship of worship to the com-

mon person?

44

Chapter 3

“In what ways did the oral and modal tradition affect the composition of music in the chant repertoire? In what ways did the theological position of music in the church affect it?

What evidence exists to indicate how chant was performed in the Middle

Ages with regard to tempo, tone color, and dynamics? What factors might account for the nearly simultaneous establishment of al significant features of liturgical music and musical ideas in the eleventh century? How important were internal musical factors, as opposed to extra-

musical, historical factors, in these developments?

Suggestions for Further Reading

Three substantial surveys of medieval music history are John Caldwell, Medieval Music (London: Hutchinson, 1978), Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: Norton, 1978), and the older book by Gustave Reese, Music in the

Middle Ages (New York: Norton, 1940). Giulio Cattin, Music of the Middle Ages

1, ans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) deals with both sacred and secular monophonic music, The standard general reference for the chant, The Liber Usualis (latest

edition New York: Desclée, 1963) is no longer in print, but is available in many libraries. Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958) provides a broad discussion of the repertoire On liturgical drama, see O,

B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian

Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965)

Notes 1 Reprinted from William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 35-36,

MEDIEVAL SECULAR SONG AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

Secular Music in the Early Middle Ages

It is impossible to imagine that secular music did not exist during the centuries when the music of the church was in a process of evolutionary ferment. Because of the unstable political situation in the early Middle Ages, however, there was little time or peace for the creation of a sophisticated art-music repertoire in the secular sphere comparable to the repertoire of the chant, Furthermore, since few outside the church could read or had the resources to copy and preserve music in written form, the historical record is naturally biased in favor of the music of the church. Thus, while there was undoubtedly singing and dancing at all levels of society from the lowliest peasantry to the upper class, this music belongs to the oral or folk tradition. It can only be known indirectly by references in literary descriptions, works of visual art, artifacts of musical instruments, and cautious reasoning from traces of it remaining in the European folk music of today. We can make a few tentative generalizations. The nature of the spoken language must have dominated song; that is, rhythms would have been metrically free and governed by speech rhythm, and melodies were probably modal in the sense that they followed simple basic formulas controlled by the rising and falling inflections of speech. The musical idiom probably did not have the standardization of pitch relationships that developed in church music, where it was important to fit the parts of the liturgy together with musical consistency and to simplify the vast 45

46

Chapter 4

body of melodies so that they could be learned precisely. Dance music would, of course, have differed from song in employing stronger and more regular rhythmic patterns, The instruments used in this music were relatively simple by comparison to those of classical antiquity.

More cannot be surmised. Only after about the year 1000 is it possible to

bring secular music into anything approaching the kind of focus with which we can view that of the church

Latin Songs

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there arose a class of renegade dropouts from the discipline of clerical studies. These young men typically wandered

about from place to place, making their living by their wits (or less honorable means) and often making themselves a general nuisance. They took as their patron saint” a mythical character named Golias (Goliath) and were known

as Goliards. Like young male students at liberty in any period, they drank and womanized a good deal, and of course they sang about their exploits, Because they were schooled enough to write, some of their songs have been preserved ‘An important collection of this sort of song is the manuscript known as Carmina Burana (Bavarian Songs), which dates from the thirteenth century. It contains not only bawdy ballads but also moralistic poetry and some quite sophisticated and touching love songs. Most are in Latin, but a few are in southern German dialect. Unfortunately Carmina Burana includes no music

that can be read today; a few of the poems have staffless neumes. From other sources that do contain readable music notation, it can be seen that the melodies bear a close resemblance to those their creators had learned in the church.

(Carl Orff, the twentieth-century German composer and pioneer in music education, set a number of the Carmina Burana songs for chorus, solo voices,

and orchestra in a rousing style that evokes the character of the texts quite effectively.) Another, more elevated type of Latin song also flourished in the eleventh

to the thirteenth centuries. These songs reflected serious thoughts and the influence of the Latin of the church and the classical Roman poetry studied in the trivium of the schools. Often the subjects of these songs were religious;

though their use was not strictly part of the liturgy itself, some seem to have been used within the sacred service. They are sometimes referred to as conduc-

tus (from the Latin word meaning “leading”), perhaps because they were em-

ployed to accompany action or a procession in the Mass or liturgical drama

A special type was the planctus or lament; the oldest one known is on the death

of Charlemagne; The music for these songs is related to the musical style of the chant. Because they adopted the rhymed and metered style of poetry, their

Medieval Secular Song and Instrumental Music

47.

settings resembled the syllabic underlay and repetitive forms of the hymn and Sequence more than the freer underlay and forms of the proselike movements of the liturgy Epics and Minstrels

An important poetic and musical genre was the popular epic sung to entertain medieval listeners with stories of their heroes’ escapades. The oral tradition of these long verse narratives, known as chansons de geste (songs of deeds), must extend back at least into the Carolingian era. They were performed by minstrels who passed them from one to another, undoubtedly enriching and embellishing the stories with each resinging. The earliest surviving written versions date from the eleventh century. The most famous of these is the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), which tells about the exploits of Charlemagne and his knights battling the Moslem armies in Spain The chansons de geste use the vernacular rather than Latin. They are based on stanzas of varying numbers of ten-syllable lines and were probably sung to simple melodic formulas, repeated for each line and adapted to meet the particular needs of unusual lines. The minstrels who sang these tales often traveled from place to place, performing in court or town square wherever an audience could be found When they met, they exchanged repertoires, thus spreading the songs throughout Europe. The minstrels cultivated a variety of other skills in addition to singing, including tumbling and juggling, from which they also became known by the alternative French name jongleurs. Despite their popularity, they were regarded as socially inferior to merchants, craftsmen, and even peasant farmers, Troubadours and Trouvéres

Beginning around 1100, a new type of lyric poetry set to music arose in the

courts of southern France. The aristocracy there found itself relatively at

peace; sufficiently wealthy to have leisure time; and educated enough to spend

its efforts in artistic, amorous, and literary pursuits. Some of them turned their

energies to writing songs. In their own language, Provencal, these poet-com-

posers were called troubadours (“finders”). By the middle of the twelfth century

such songwriting at the courts had spread to the north of France and to England, where the composers were called by the French name trouvéres. The common image of a troubadour as a wandering minstrel is, of course,

48

Chapter +

quite mistaken; the troubadours belonged to the upper class of society and

composed poetry and music, while the minstrels were found at the lowest

social level and were primarily illiterate peeformers. Probably the most famous trouvere is England's King Richard the Lionhearted. There is a legend that he was once imprisoned in a secret donjon in Austria and was rescued after being located by his friend and fellow trouvére

Blondel de Nesle, who traveled about singing one of Richard’s own songs until

he heard the captive king answer. The canso of the troubadours and the chanson of the trouvéres usually dealt with themes of chivalrous love. In the highly stylized courtly manners reflected and supported by the songs of troubadours and trouvéres, the love in question was usually that ofa young knight for someone else's wife. The lover suffered, pleaded, and ventured deeds of honor for tokens of recognition from the object of his passion. Physical consummation of the relationship was perhaps more dreamed-of than likely, for despite frequent references to sexual intimacy the beloved is often compared with the Virgin Mary in her purity and

chastity: intensity of desire always took precedence over its fulfillment. The subject might be treated from any one of a variety of viewpoints; typical formats were the lament (plank), a disputation about the fine points of courtly love (tenso in the south and descort in the north), an amorous encounter of a

knight and a shepherdess (pastorela or pastourelle), and the parting of lovers at dawn (alba, aubade).

(Fig. 4.1) There were also dance songs (balada, ballade),

whose lighthearted texts generally took a somewhat explicit seductive ap-

proach, mocking the jealous husbands of the women involved.

About five thousand troubadour and trouvére song texts survive, with

music for about two thousand, mostly from the later, northern tradition. The

melodies are relatively simple, and their pitch organization is very similar to that of ecclesiastical sacred chant. There is no clear rhythmic notation for the

vast majority of the repertory, but it is likely that the songs were sung with a more metered rhythm than chant since the texts themselves were poetic ones. One

of the most

important

contributions

of the trouvéres was their

unprecedented exploitation of the possibilities of musical form. Just as they adopted standardized approaches to their subject matter, they also developed standard poetic designs and musical plans. The internal structures of the

stanzas of their songs often rely on recurring melodic phrases, with clear reliance on the distinction between open-ended and conclusive phrase end-

ings. There eventually developed a somewhat standardized stanza structure,

consisting of an opening part, or frons, made up ofa repeated pair of phrases

(pedes; singular pes), followed by a closing section, or cauda, of several more or less independent phrases, a pattern that can be outlined as follows frons

cauda

ab

ab

pes

pes

x

Medieval Secular Song and Instrumental Music

49

Figure 4.1 Gerard Leeu, “Aubade,” from L'Istoire du tres-vaillant chevalier Paris et la belle Vienne, fille du dauphin. A troubadour sings an aubade in the garden below a lady's window, accompanied by a minstrel. The narrative accompanying this picture tells how the young nobleman Paris and his minstrel entered the garden during the night to sing in the morning for the princess Vienne @Bild-Archiv der Oesterreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)

The cauda may also incorporate, literally or in varied form, material from the frons, particularly the b part of the pes German Court Music

Taking the troubadours as their models, the German courts also produced aristocratic poet-composers, called Minnesinger (from Minne, the German

word for courtly love). True to a general tendency of German culture, their songs, or Minnelieder, were inclined to be a bit soberer than those of the troubadours. Many of the texts are explicitly religious in content The melodies of the Minnelieder tend to be more angular and inclined to melodic skips than those of the Provencal canso or French chanson, but they also show some influence of the chant, As to rhythm, itis likely that German,

50

Chapter 4

which uses stress accents, produced a more regularly metered music than French, which does not The predominant form in the Lieder of the Minnesinger was the AAB design, known in German as Bar form, The first two sections, which might have several phrases each, were called Stollen, and the third section, which also might have several phrases, was called Abgesang. The similarity of this plan to that of the characteristic form of troubadour and trouvére songs is obvious Stollen Afabetc)

Stollen

Abgesang,

Afabetc.)

B

As in the French repertory, in order to give unity to the entire strophe the Abgesang might share some of the subordinate phrases of the Stollen, particularly the cadential phrase Somewhat later (from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries) the Min-

nesinger tradition was preserved and extended by the Meistersinger, middleclass composers who organized themselves into guilds, The Meistersinger constructed elaborate rules and complex poetic and musical structures, quite

unlike their much more spontaneous forebears. In the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner wrote about these musicians in his music drama Die Meister-

singer von Niirnberg, which explores the perennial tension between artistic progress and the conservative rules of the artistic establishment.

Monophonic Songs in Other Nations Italy

Beginning in the thirteenth century there grew up an Italian tradition of popular spiritual songs called laude, These are more like folk songs than the sophisticated artistic creations of the troubadours, trouvéres, and Minnesinger, although some of them show the same basic principles of form as the northern composers’ works. The laude were begun by bands of pilgrims who roamed from place to place doing penance on behalf of the rest of the sinful world and often performing self-flagellation. The laude may have been used either as marching music or as accompaniment to the flagellation itself, In Germany such penitents were called Geissler, and they developed their own repertoire of songs (Geisslerlieder) parallel to those in Italy Spain and Portugal

The Spanish and Portuguese also began to write songs in their vernaculars in the thirteenth century, The most important of these are the collection of Canti-

Medieval Secular Song and Instrumental Music

51

gas de Santa Maria. These cantigas date from the court of King Alfonso X (“the Wise”) of Castile and Leon in the second half of the thirteenth century, a court

that was also familiar with the songs of the troubadours. They express the

popular devotion to the worship of the Virgin Mary, and many recount her miracles, although their primary intention must have been to entertain the

court. In structure they often resemble the songs of the trouvéres. Among the song types discussed in this chapter, however, the appearance of accurate rhythmic notation is unique to the Cantigas de Santa Maria, possibly because of their late date. Britain

The British Isles had a long oral tradition of song before they produced written

music. British musicians developed a wide variety of medieval English lyrics,

both religious and secular in character. The bulk of surviving material is somewhat less sophisticated than the repertoire of the continental composers, but the songs compensate for this by the intensity and sincerity of their texts

and the simplicity and directness of their music.

Particularly popular in England was the carol. Carols were originally dance or processional songs, constructed in several verses that were introduced, separated, and concluded by a

refrain called the burden. While some

purely secular carols existed, most had religious or at least moral texts. Often

the texts combined English lyrics with phrases in Latin, reflecting their seriousness of tone. Many carols were associated with festivals, though their con-

nection with Christmas in particular came only later.

Medieval Instruments

Although scoring for specific instruments was not a feature of medieval musical practice, many instruments existed and were used in the music of these centuries. Most of the evidence of instrumental performance comes from extramusical sources, such as depictions in painting and sculpture and references in literature. The following discussion will give only a brief overview of the many instruments available to medieval musicians The modern idea of grouping instruments according to families did not exist in the Middle Ages, Instruments were built singly and could be played in any combinations that were available and feasible. The only classification used grouped instruments according to volume and function. Some instruments were loud, or haut (French for “high”), and belonged outdoors or in very large halls, Other instruments made a more delicate, soft sound and were called low, or bas (French for “low”). (Fig, 4.2)

52

Chapter 4 es garda que our neu fe 2 tune tance ni quate “e quintmer fe oa s Dametaucenebade — D uchauc rea prue ewe on ls rble nat oenelame 7 ama (2 wapannes fe weoiene pete gomne obfaure ne uensr ene nefpaite eureute fRenro at Gi lee tefers cre our are A ai Pax queplowae rout nen 1 ove eou IRD eps hosebe fis 1s samen prter e rgumencqun mor mer rie cacio x pa efengier econ qu ame eae He 7 mone Aue ne Deculs obareapiee + ozefO gre ox anemis fone h grt hawe ee poe 1 acc nines erent Dew com herbeen d tegeane ine en ts requerenc 1 thar areFu rourne J % trcou fone enftis lt 1 a now reamenche 1: moraice =r eleneficveue en Ane ucriee ee

Figure 4.2

Some combinations of medieval instruments, from a fourteenth-century manuscript. Two haut combinations are shown—trumpets and drums, bagpipe and shawm—and one bas combination—vielle and harp. (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodley 264, fol. 157.) String Instruments

The distant medieval relatives of the ancient lyre or kithara varied a great deal Some were plucked with fingers or a plectrum, often a bird quill. The harp, whose ancestry goes back to ancient Egypt, appears in drawings and carvings from around the time of Charlemagne. It ranked as a royal instrument in Ireland. As the Arabic culture began to be influential in Europe in the Middle Ages, another plucked instrument, the psaltery, became popular. The psaltery was a resonating flat wooden box, often triangular or trapezoidal, strung with a number of slightly raised strings running parallel across its surface. The psaltery was also called canon from the Arabic qanun. The Moorish ud became the European lute in the fourteenth century. At first the lute was plucked or strummed with a quill. The plucking technique used with these instruments did not, of course, lend itself to the performance of polyphonic music The Middle Ages also had bowed string instruments. One, another Middle Eastern export, was the rebec, a pear-shaped instrument of which the neck was actually the narrow end of the body. It had three strings. The rebec actually survives today as a folk instrument in southeastern Europe. The French vielle or German Fiedel had a flat-backed body, a solid, separate neck, and usually five strings. A more complicated cousin of the vielle, the hurdy-gurdy or organistrum, employed a rosined wheel and a crank instead of a bow to set up the

dieval Secular Song and Instrumental Music

57

For a good discussion of performance matters, see Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Notes 1. Reprinted from James McKinnon, “The Church Fathers and Musical Instruments,” (Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1965), 230-240,

THE DEVELOPMEN OF POLYPHONY

The Significance of Polyphony

The supreme musical achievement of the early Middle Ages was the development of polyphonic texture in music. This new texture reflects in music some of the tendencies of the other arts during the course of the

Carolingian (800-1000) and Romanesque (1000-1150) periods. These

tendencies—an increase of mass and, in later phases, the proliferation of decoration—were particularly clear in architecture The development of composed polyphony, resulting in the displacement of pure melody by multivoiced networks of sound, is an achievement unique to Western music. Much was gained in the creation of polyphony: There was a new sense of depth in the musical texture, and there were increased possibilities for symbolic expression through explicit harmonic relationships. At the same time, the coordination of contrasting lines limited certain elements of style. Rhythm was no longer as free to respond to subtleties in the rhythms of oral language, and melody could no longer be freely ornamented Early polyphonic music was referred to by its practitioners and theorists as organum. It was formed by adding a new line of music in simultaneous performance with the existing chant, which thus became the cantus firmus (fixed song). Because it was built on the foundation of chant melody, it resembles conceptually the architecture ofa medieval church, which was constructed on a standard cruciform foundation Therefore it constituted an application of the principle of the trope, with which it developed almost simultaneously. The idea of troping by superimposition of material on an authoritative text does not differ in essence from the insertion of textual or musical phrases into a chant; in organum, the trope is applied simultaneously rather than sequentially 59

Chapter 5

60

Carolingian Polyphony

The practice of polyphonic singing evolved from the simple doubling of the chant in octaves or other intervals. It is likely that the first singers of polyphony were inspired by the recognition that men and boys would generally sing

the chant in parallel octaves. By the ninth century they had codified this

practice and expanded it to include parallel doublings in the other perfect intervals, the fourth and fifth. (It is also possible that the use of the fourth and

fifth were inspired by the sound of singing ina large, open sanctuary, where the acoustics reinforced the lower partials of the vocal pitch, creating the effect of parallel voices.) We refer to this simple style as parallel organum The main surviving sources for this practice are two books dating from

about

900,

Musica

enchiriadis

(Music

handbook)

and

Scolica

enchiriadis

(School handbook), which give rules for improvising parallel organum. The

singers are instructed to begin with the first note of the chant (the melody referred to as vox principals), find the note a fourth or fifth below, and then sing the melody in parallel, beginning on those two pitches (the added lower voice becomes the vox organalis). Either or both of these lines may be further doubled at the octave, producing three or four voices Parallel organum does not have the effect of true, independent polyphony; it merely adds harmonic color and depth to the line as the overtones of the

organal voice combine with those of the principal voice. (Something similar

was achieved later in impressionist music with sliding, nonfunctional, tertian harmonies.) In addition to the simple use of parallel motion, however, the sources allow the possibility that the voices will begin in unison, with the vox organalis remaining stationary until the vox principalis has reached the fourth or fifth above and then proceeding parallel to it and returning to the unison for the cadence of the phrase. We refer to the motion ofa moving voice against a stationary one as oblique motion. This procedure already represents an important innovation, since it provides for temporary dissonance leading to consonance and implies the concept of harmonic resolution, It is the first step in the direction of genuine counterpoint. In fact the term counterpoint is derived from the Latin phrase

for this kind of homorhythmic relationship of parts,

punctus contra punctum (“point against point,” i. e., note against note)

Romanesque Developments Free Organum

The next stage in the development of polyphony occurred in about the eleventh century, At this time musicians explored the possibilities of indepen-

yay why SEAN

ear

ane EN

aS

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“neMea mus

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ie 4 inet

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Figure 5.3

A page of the Magnus liber organi in the fine Florence manuscript (F)

(Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Florence)

68

Chapter 5

of determinate rhythmic relationships to the melodic lines, greatly clarifying

the coordination of the polyphonic parts. This is accomplished by means of a system known as the rhythmic modes. A composer trained at the university

would certainly have studied the principles of poetry, and it is therefore not surprising that such a composer would turn to the well-known organization of long and short syllables grouped in metrical feet. To comprehend the striking new sound of this music, we must understand the basic principles of the Notre Dame system of rhythmic modes.

To apply poetic metrical patterns to music, the Notre Dame musicians presumed that a long note or long (Latin longa, often abbreviated as L and notated as a square notehead with a tail descending from the right) would be twice the duration of a short note or breve (Latin brevis, abbreviated as B and

notated as a simple, square notehead). The alternation of long and short notes produced “trochaic” (LB, LB, LB, etc.) or “iambic” (BL, BL, BL, etc.) rhythms.

More complex metrical feet, consisting of three durations, were simulated by the use of an extralong long equal to three breves, called “perfect” to distinguish it from the two-breve or “imperfect” long, and an “altered” breve twice as long as a normal (“recta” or correct) breve.

This allowed for the

dactylic" rhythm (LBB, LBB, LBB, etc.) and the “anapestic” rhythm (BBL, BBL,

BBL, etc.), where the long was perfect and the second of the two breves was altered. Two other patterns were added, the “spondaic,” plodding along in of perfect longs, and the “tribrachic,” which tripped quickly in groups of three regular breves The six rhythmic modes were numbered (like the ecclesiastical modes) They can be summarized and clarified in modern notation as follows:

Mode 1 2

3

Metrical Model troche iamb

dactyl

4

anapest

5

spondee

6

rribrach

Modal Notation

Modern Notation

LB (L imperfect) BL (L imperfect)

io a

second B altered)

daodd

LBB (L perfect,

BBL (second B

altered, L perfect) LL (both perfect) BBB (all recta)

odd ae dds

It works very well to notate this music in modern notation in § time, and that has become the usual way to transcribe the Notre Dame repertoire. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the convention was to indicate each mode by a particular ligature pattern. Thus the singers learned that a threenote ligature followed by a series of two-note ligatures would require rhythmic

dune fein Ese

Bilona phrecfihoce Ee y {pun fanc =

Plate 3

The Limbourg brothers, Annunciation to the Shepherds, from the Tres riches heures de Jean, duc de Berry (1413-16). Though the illustration is of a biblical event, the Limbourgs’ inclusion of many everyday details reflects a new, humanistic aesthetic The angels are shown with lute, drum, music manuscript, shawm or trumpet, and vielle. (Giraudon/Art Resource)

political event of Paul Hindemith’ Mathis der Maler

Plate 5 Lay ish aristocratic support of the arts int he Baroque led to lavish sty shor wn in Peter Paul Rubens’s (1 1640) portraya of the arrival of Maria Medici in France. Maria's wed

ing in Florence to the French King, Her nry IV, had provid 1e oceasion the composition of J

opera Euridice. After Henry's ¢ ed as regent for her son,

XIII,

h Louis

Rubens depicted the events of

her life in a series of allegorical

paintings in this (Musée du Louvre

highly ornate style

Photo

R.M.N.)

Plate

6

eral

restraintin th

Raft of the Medusa (1818), p of man and

The picture deals

Plate 8 J.M.W, Turner (1

1851), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Italy (exh. 1832), The different forms of art became closely bound together in the Romantic period. Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage inspired not only this painting by Turner but also Hector Berlioz's symphony Harold en Italic two years later. To all three artists Italy represented not primarily the repository of the clasical artistic traditic but a source of Romantic inspiration in its scenery and people. Turner actual exhibited his work with this quotation

from

and now, fair Italy!y Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?

Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy wa

More rich than other

climes’

fertility

Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be defac

(Tate Gallery/Art Resource

iste Ca

or Mess Plate 9

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral (1894), This is only one of a series of paintings Monet made of this cathedral’s facade in various different types of light at different

times of day and night. The impressionist painters were more interested in the sensual impact of light on the eye than in accuracy of detail. Monet's depiction of the cathedral at Rouen obviously does not attempt to help the viewer perceive the symbolic structure or sculptural and decorative elements of the Gothic architecture. Impressionist composers took a similar approach to the sense of hearing {Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915, TheadoreM. Davis Collection [30.95.250])

Plate 10 Paul Ga was a leader

1 (1848-1903), Day of the Gods (Mahana no among the artists at theturn of the century

the late Romantic and post-Re a South Pacific

antic style

culture for its natur

sharply outlined, flat are

painting

Atua)

communi

while the technique of

gave a simplerand 1

of expression than the styles against

which Gauguin rebelled. (oil onc

Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collect

98, © 1989, The Art Ins

Plate 11

Vassily Kandinsky (1866. 1944), Fugue (1910 Expre onism in painting emple

that ja

sense of sight,

and

frustrated the

rational mind.

undecipherable shapes that

The abstractness and yet force of expression thal resulted led Kand

musical tit mber of his works, as in

this case

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. h hy Daviel

of Chicago.

All

Music in the Late Middle Ages.

©

wazvoeaded

O

mevee=bd ttdl

GC meee C

meee

-$hb bh

ddd

83,

dil

oat dd

The system of mensural notation, showing signatures and the rhythmic combinations each indicates

Isorhythm

The persistence of delight in numerical combinations that we have already noted in our discussion is evidenced by an elaborate organizational process that was applied to the motet and motetlike compositions in the fourteenth

century: the device of isorhythm (from the Greek prefix iso, meaning “the same”), This term applies to the technique by which a line of polyphonic music, usually the tenor, is organized by serial repetitions of a pattern of rhythmic values. Motet tenors during the thirteenth century had, as discussed

earlier, used repetitive ordo rhythms, creating short, reiterated rhythmic figures. We have also observed composers extending tenor melodies borrowed from the chant by simple repetition. In the ars nova, new complexities were explored. The durational values of

the tenor part were laid out in several repetitions of a single, often quite

extensive statement called the talea (cognate with our word tally, meaning

“count”), The pitch content could also be set out as several repetitions of a melodic pattern called color. The talea and color might have different numbers

of units, thereby demonstrating mathematical relationships in sound. For example, Vitry’s motet “Garrit gallus/In nova fert/Neuma” has a tenor of seventytwo notes, with a talea of twelve durations and a color of thirty-six pitches. In

the piece the talea is stated six times and the color twice. The tenor of the second half of the motet is thus identical to that of the first half.

84

Chapter 6

All kinds of symbolic number relationships could be contrived. Naturally such mathematical subtleties might not be evident to the uninitiated listener; the performer of the tenor, of course, would soon become aware of the talea as he counted the rhythm of his part. The intricate musical structure was not intended to be obvious but was an expression of the composer's love of, and skill in handling, proportion and order. On an abstract and perhaps subconscious level, the isorhythm would give unity and coherence to a large musical construction The Roman de Fauvel

A major source of ars nova motets (and for some earlier music as well) is a

satirical compilation of music and poetry, the Roman de Fauvel (ca. 1316), put together by the poet Gervais de Bus. The Roman de Fauvel comprises a series

of stories about an imaginary horse or ass named Fauvel; the name is an acrostic derived from the initial letters of the six vices—Flattery, Avarice,

Villainy, Variability, Envy, Lasciviousness. (Fig. 6.2) The text mocks many of the evils and hypocrisies of the fourteenth century, not sparing the clergy or the political powers. To say that the texts are irreverent would be an immense understatement; no holds are barred. The extent of disrespect to which the church is subjected indicates the depths to which it had fallen, but the nobility fares little better, (In an altered form, the name of Fauvel survives today in the

English expression “to curry favor.” The French phrase étriller Fauvel—"to curry Fauvel’—and the old English currayen Favel became popular expressions to describe seeking gain by hypocritical flattery.) The Roman de Fauvel comprises over three thousand lines of French poetry, and interpolated among them is a variety of Latin and French music There are monophonic pieces, including Latin liturgical chant, sequences, and conductus, and French trouvere-style and more popular songs. In addition,

there are thirty-four motets with Latin, French, or mixed texts, in a variety of

styles.

They range from the earliest ars antiqua motet type in two voices

through contemporary styles, with twenty-three three-voice and even one four-part piece. Several of more advanced pieces are attributed to Philippe de Vitry himself. Thus the Roman de Fauvel constitutes a representative musical anthology of polyphonic styles from an entire century or more. Form in Secular Song

The composers of the fourteenth century wrote many polyphonic love songs, extending the tradition of the troubadours and trouveres. Since they did not

Mustc in the Late Middle Ages

85;

Figure 6.2 A page from the Roman de Fauvel. Masked revelers are shown here playing drums, vielle, and cymbals. (Bibliotheque nationale, Paris)

employ cantus firmi but freely composed all the voices, they developed the structural procedures of their predecessors to create several standardized designs, known in French as formes fixes (fixed forms). The three main formes fixes are all based on stanzas having the simple musical plan aab. A second common characteristic was the additional presence of a refrain, for which both text and music were unaltered at each appearance The most easily explained of the formes fixes, that of the ballade, simply consisted of stanzas in ab form and a recurring refrain, Thus, indicating the refrain by the letter C (the use of the capital letter shows that the words as well as the music return in the refrain), the musical formof a three-stanza ballade would be outlined aabC

aabC

aabC

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Chapter 6

Another popular form was the virelai. Unlike the ballade, the virelai began with a statement of the refrain (A), and it employed the same music for the refrain as for the end of each stanza (a). Asa result, a virelai in three stanzas took the form AbbaAbbaAbbaA

A bit more elaborate than the ballade and the virelai was the rondeau. The refrain of the rondeau was in two parts (AB) and therefore shared both of its melodic sections with the stanza. This two-part refrain preceded and followed the single stanza, and its first line also interrupted the stanza, giving the form ABaAab

AB

Cadence Patterns in the Fourteenth Century

We must now pick up a thread we first discovered in the music of the arg antiqua, the development of the cadence. The 6-8 (or 3-1) and the§ ss cadences continued to be used in the fourteenth century, but with new characteristics (Ex. 6.1). Composers had discovered the effect of the half-step, lead-

ing-tone motion to the final from below, which gave a much stronger cadential feeling than the modal whole steps from the lower seventh scale degree. Thus,

where the seventh note of the mode lay a whole tone below the final, it was

raised chromatically to produce a leading tone. This was particularly true of the modes with finals d and g; the f modes naturally have a leading tone, while the situation in the e modes is complicated by the occurrence of a half step

above the final. In some cases the penultimate tone at the cadence in the inner part of a three-voice cadence was also sharped, producing a “double leading tone” cadence. These chromatic alterations were not necessarily notated but could be

applied by performers according to convention. Such adjustments were

known as musica ficta. Musica ficta was also applied in other situations, to avoid melodic and harmonic tritones, for example. Modern editors of medi-

eval music commonly indicate the appropriate places for such alterations by

placing accidentals above the notes.

The cadence was also commonly ornamented in the top line by a step

down from the leading tone to the tone below and thena skip to the resolution

on the final note. The best term for this type of cadence is escape-tone cadence (It is sometimes called a Landini cadence after the Italian composer Francesco Landini, but this is misleading both because many composers used this ornament and because Landini himself did not do so consistently.)

Music in the Late Middle Ages

87

Example 6.1 Development of the cadence. a. Addition of leading tone to cadence in three voices -

8

=

b, Double-leading-tone cadence

== ¢. Escape-tone cadence Bags Guillaume de Machaut

The greatest composer of the ars nova was Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 13001377). Like Vitry, he worked as secretary to.a king, in Machaut’s case King John of Bohemia, and at the end of his life held a religious position, as canon at the great Gothic cathedral at Reims. Unlike Vitry, Machaut was not a thea-

rist, but a renowned poet, Some of his secular poetry and music seems to have been the product ofa relationship Machaut had while he was in his sixties with

a young girl named Peronne, who was also a poet. The two wrote love letters

and sent each other poetry for several years Machaut wrote a great deal of poetry not set to music, as well as many

songs. In this sense he belongs to the trouvére tradition, and he demon-

strated his genius in masterfully constructed monophonic and polyphonic

songs in the formes fixes Machaut composed twenty-three motets, all for three parts. These set both Latin and French texts, and they treat both sacred and secular topics. They

were often quite elaborate in design and ingenious in the use of isorhythm. Unlike the polyphonic ballades, rondeaux, and virelais, therefore, the motets seem to have been intended for an elite audience; they show Machaut as a

composer's composer.

Machaut’s most famous composition is his Mass known as the Messe de

Notre Dame. It is the earliest surviving setting of the complete polyphonic

Mass Ordinary by a single composer. Earlier examples exist of paired Mass Ordinary movements, such as Kyries and Glorias, and of composite Masses;

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Chapter 6

but the Machaut Mass stands alone in the fourteenth century as a unified multimovement whole, and it is also the longest Mass cycle of the period. The Messe de Notre Dame is partly of the type called a plainsong Mass; except for its Gloria and Credo, Machaut used a chant melody of an appropriate liturgical movement as tenor for each polyphonic movement. One immediately notable feature of Machaut’s Mass is its density. It is scored in four yoices rather than the more common three. This can also be observed in his secular works. The new part is a contratenor, occupying the same general range as the tenor. Tenor and contratenor interact; they often cross and also have complicated musical relationships, The shorter texts of the Mass Ordinary—Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and

the closing formula Ite, missa est—are set in motet style, with faster-moving duplum and triplum over steadier tenor and contratenor. Machaut employed isorhythm in a number of passages in these movements, often in quite elaborate fashion and sometimes in all four parts at once. The longer texts of the Gloria and Credo are, for practical reasons, simpler and more nearly homorhythmic Machaut was a remarkable figure, and he holds a place of honor as high in the history of literature as in that of music. His significance to our understanding of the musical situation in the fourteenth century lies in the range of his compositions. Because he worked with equal ease and success in both sacred and secular styles, he stands as an excellent representative of the balance and tension that existed between the sacred and secular sides of life in his time Mannerism: The Ars Subtilior

French music in the late fourteenth century explored, or rather exploited, the possibilities of ars nova technique to their limits. Musical grace became of secondary importance to elaboration and intricacy. Thus the style, called ars subtilior (more subtle art), represents a stage characterized by the term mannerism. Mannerism is a recurring phenomenon in the history of music (as well as

of other arts). The phenomenon occurs toward the end of the life span of a style when creative artists seem to have attained such great facility with the

techniques of the style that indulgence of technique becomes an end in itself One manifestation of mannerism in the fourteenth century was the exploi-

tation of the notational possibilities of the mensural system. Composers used

every device of the new art to work out what would be the most complex

thythmic relationships between voices in polyphonic texture prior to the twentieth century. In extreme cases the music becomes very difficult to per-

form, and the proportions are almost impossible to hear. In certain cases the

rhythmic notation, with its circles and semicircles, dots and lines, various note

Music in the Late Middle Ages

89

shapes, and contrasting ink colors, seems to have been as important visually as aurally. Music was notated on staves drawn in concentric citcles, and in one famous case in the shape ofa heart (Baude Cordier’s “Belle bonne,"a love song, of course). (Plate 2) At the same time, composers tested the limits of chromatic harmony and dissonance. By the end of the century the old modal vocabulary of eight pitch classes (counting the alternative b natural and b flat) had expanded to include the other pitches of the chromatic scale. As long as the music reached an ultimate perfect consonance, composers could try almost any amount of intervening dissonance. The imperfect consonance of the major third functioned as a tolerable temporary sonority for use on rhythmically strong beats, although its acceptance at final cadences remained more than a century in the future The Italian Trecento

Polyphony got a late start in Italy. It arose quite suddenly in a relatively

sophisticated form in the fourteenth century, or trecento as the Italians call it There had been no practice of composed organum in sacred music to establish

a foundation in Italy for the kinds of developments that took place in France

When polyphonic composition did finally appear, it remained generally within the secular sphere. Characteristic of Italian music in the trecento, as in

the rest of music history, its grace resides primarily in melody, which, though

often elaborate, constantly maintains its vocal character. Italian composers of the trecento did not indulge in either the rhythmic intricacies or the harmonic contortions of their French contemporaries. The greatest of them was Fran-

cesco Landini (ca, 1325-1397), a blind organist and song-writer, praised in

the literary works of his contemporaries, including Boccaccio.

Italian trecento music is represented in a beautiful manuscript known as

the Squarcialupi Codex. This elegant anthology, prepared in the fifteenth cen-

tury, is not always completely accurate in its musical text, but it preserves over 350 of what its compiler must have considered the best or most representative

music of the trecento.

One of the leading forms in this repertoire was the madrigal, which must

not be confused with the more familiar Renaissance madrigal. Trecento madri-

gal poetry dealt with pastoral or amorous topics and was organized into two or three stanzas of three lines each, plus a refrain or ritornello (from the Italian word for “return”) of two lines, often in a contrasting meter. This produced a

musical structure comparable to that of the ballade in France or the Bar in Germany, though less sophisticated. The madrigal was set in a texture of two

voices without a tenor, both parts carrying the same text and sometimes interacting in question-and-answer style or hocket, or even in momentary passages of imitation.

90

Chapter 6 A second common form, the ballata, developed later than the madrigal

and differs from it in both texture and form. The ballata was scored in three

lines, a relatively elaborate vocal melody above two lower parts, tenor and contratenor, that moved in somewhat slower rhythm and may have been

played on instruments. This texture is sometimes known as cantilena. The form of the ballata shows the influence of the French formes fixes. It consists

of a two-line refrain called ripresa, a verse made up of two piedi of two lines each and a volta using the same music as the ripresa, followed by the return of the ripresa. The ballata form might be outlined thus:

ripresa AB

piedi

volta

edcd

ab

ripresa AB

It resembles (unfortunately for modern students) the French virelai. Another popular type of song was the caccia. The Italian word means chase” or “hunt,” and the texts portrayed the outdoor life in realistic fashion The texture involved two equal voices and a lower part in slower motion. Often the vocal lines depicted the sounds of the hunt with onomatopoeic syllables and appropriate musical gestures. The name of the genre also had a punning meaning, for the upper parts were constructed in canon so that the second voice actually “chases” the first through the piece. In France a similar composition was known as chace, and the English later used the term catch for a popular type of song, The thoroughgoing polyphonic imitation in the caccia presented a new problem for the composer: Instead of composing the voices successively above the tenor, as had always been the case in cantus-firmus style polyphony, one had to construct the imitative lines simultaneously in order to prevent harmonic disaster. Naturally the lowest voice would then have to be written last rather than first. The tenor, born from the authority of the music of the church, could no longer be conceived as the fundamental and most important voice in the texture; it had become merely an accompaniment to the vocal melody above The rapid growth of secular culture in Italy that we mentioned earlier in discussing the literary works of Petrarch and Boccaccio was thus paralleled in music. By the sixteenth century Italy would become the center of European musical culture. First, however, a general upheaval, already begun in the fourteenth century, completely reshaped the careers and the ideas of artists and musicians and, indeed, created one of the great divides in the history of Western culture English Polyphony

Before leaving the fourteenth century, we must take note of some peculiarities of polyphony in England during this period. The English had adopted French

Music in the Late Middle Ages.

91

styles in the thirteenth century; indeed, one of the great sources of the Notre

Dame repertoire, the manuscript W1, came from St. Andrews in Scotland. The

genres of conductus and motet are represented among the “Worcester fragments” (so named because this type of composition seems to have been centered in Worcester), which date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Another genre appearing in the Worcester fragments, the rondellus, exploits the principle of voice exchange as the basis for somewhat extended compositions, We have already encountered the use of voice exchange in Notre Dame organa of the Perotin style, but the technique became especially developed in England, In the rondellus, all the parts have the same material, but segments of this material are presented in different orders in the various voices, so that each idea is passed around among them, There might also be an independent bottom line consisting of a repeated phrase called pes (Latin for “foot”)

Gymel and English Discant English musical style differed from continental music in its use of simple

rhythms and homorhythmic texture, a taste for the imperfect consonances of the third and sixth, and reticence about the free use of dissonance.

These

tendencies were exploited in two special types of polyphonic singing used in England in the late Middle Ages. The simpler of these was gymel, in which an

improvised second voice was expanded from an existing part in the course of a polyphonic composition, usually (at least in earlier examples) requiring the other polyphonic parts to drop out. (The improvisation required singers to employ the technique of “sighting,” in which they mentally visualized their notes on the staff with the notated line.) The other type of English polyphonic singing, which was known as English discant, employed three voices in pre-

dominantly homorhythmic texture, In English discant the cantus firmus characteristically lies in the middle voice; the counter, which runs below it, may

form octaves, sixths, fifths, thirds, and unisons with it; the third voice rides

above the cantus firmus and has a tendency to parallel it at the fourth, An unusual but characteristically English sound results when the cantus firmus in the middle is paralleled by the counter at the lower third and the upper voice at the fourth, producing consecutive § sonorities. In such contexts, the imper-

fect intervals no longer seem merely subsidiary to perfect ones but are clearly

valued for their full sonority

Secular Music: Rota Little strictly secular music has survived from England in the fourteenth century. The most remarkable example is the famous rota “Sumer is icumen in.”

The rota resembles the rondellus, except that instead of beginning together the

92

Chapter 6

upper voices have staggered entrances, producing canonic imitation. “Sumer is icumen in” contains four canonic upper lines and two bottom lines that relate by voice exchange. The resulting polyphonic construct is extremely sophisticated for its time (perhaps as early as the end of the thirteenth century). It is also noteworthy for the constant presence of thirds in its harmonic structure, which gives it a strikingly advanced sound. The English predilections for straightforward, easily followed rhythms and for the richness of the imperfect consonances reveal a musical aesthetic based more on empirical, sensual values than on symbolic, intellectual principles, This would have considerable influence on the future of music throughout Europe Questions for Reflection

What advantages did Vitry’s rhythmic notation system have over the system that preceded it? What advantages might it have over that used for the music of the period of common practice? “In the perspective of their careers in general, what place did music have in the lives of Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut? =

How did the music and musical thinking of the fourteenth century chal-

lenge traditional assumptions about music? In general what ideas did it threaten?

=

What individual traits of music in France, Italy, and England in the four-

teenth century reflected national tastes or cultural tendencies that extend

through the history of those nations beyond that century?

Suggestions for Further Reading For the treatise Ars nova, see the translation by Leon Plantinga in Journal of Music Theory 5 (1961), 204-223.

Other fourteenth-century treatises, includ-

ing the discussions of the new notation in France by Jean de Muris and of the

somewhat different Italian system by Marchetto da Padua, as well as the con-

servative attack on the new notation by Jacob of Liege, are excerpted in

Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950).

Gilbert Reaney, Guillaume de Machaut (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) is a good biography of this important composer.

THE RISE OF THE RENAISSANCE

Renaissance Humanism

The increasing secularization of culture in the fourteenth century produced the movement we know as the Renaissance. In contrast to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance freed the imagination from authority, spe-

cifically from the dogma of the church, There arose a new conviction that solutions to problems and the achievement of personal fulfillment could come from human intellect and effort rather than only from divine revelation or grace. This new movement is referred to as humanism: By the fifteenth century the role and power of the church had declined sharply. Even after the Council of Constance had mended the Great Schism in 1417, the church never entirely regained its authority although it staved off the inevitable crisis of the Reformation for another century. Despite its continued political and economic importance, it had lost its domination over the manner of thinking in Western culture; the period of reliance on ecclesiastically sanctioned authority for understanding had come to an end. No longer satisfied to build their ideas on the foundation of scripture and the authority of the church, the humanist artists and thinkers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries returned to the pre-Christian civilization of Greek and Roman antiquity for models and for confirma tion that a European culture need not depend on the Christian religion Petrarch, for example, actively sought out and rediscovered important documents of the classical philosophers and writers, Many ancient treatises were published and circulated in translation. Sculptors and architects modeled their work on the statues and temples of Greece and Rome. In this sense, the humanist movement could justifiably’ be consid93

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Chapter 7

ered a “renaissance,” or rebirth of classic culture, in relation to which the intervening period seemed a “middle” or “dark” age pecially influential was the reemergence in the fifteenth century of the works of Plato. As we noted in discussing Gothic thought and the scholastics, Plato had been eclipsed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Aristotle. But with the patronage of the Medici family, who ruled the city of Florence, Marsilio Fico (1433-1499) translated all of Plato's works into Latin, and they were avidly studied throughout Europe. The pursuit of a higher Reality, a goal clearly derived from Plato's thought, became an important quest for the Renaissance But this higher Reality was to be pursued outside the divine revelation of Christianity, within humankind itself. Pico della Mirandola (1463— 1494), another Florentine, penned an “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” citing in his argument for a view of humanity as a great miracle not only JudeoChristian scripture but also ancient classical and Arabic sources. The purpose of philosophy and art for the Renaissance humanists no longer consisted in winning salvation after death, but in virti, personal success and honor achieved through the cultivation of one’s own talents and personal fulfillment in this life. In 1434 the architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) wrote, addressing the young men of his family, But if anyone wants to investigate diligently what most exalts and increases families and what maintains them at a high level of honor and of happiness, he will clearly perceive that men most often bring about each of their own good conditions and each of their bad ones; nor, indeed, will he attribute to any material thing such power that he would ever judge virti to be worth less than fortune when it comes to gaining, praises, greatness, and fame In consequence of this belief that persons are the masters of their own fate, there grew up a new and pervasive optimism about mankind itself. As the times changed, people began to take a new view of the world Empiricism replaced authority, and firsthand observation became the principle of knowledge and art Asa result, long-held beliefs about the nature of earth and heaven collapsed. Christopher Columbus's conviction that the earth was round so overpowered the received assumption that one could fall off the edge that he staked his life on it in the attempt to establish a new route to the Orient.

The astronomical observations of Copernicus (1473-1543) shattered

the crystalline heavenly spheres in which the stars and planets had been supposed to rotate about the earth. The humanist artists also looked at their world in an entirely new way Instead of seeing things as symbolic of divine order, and objects as material for glorification of the house and word of God, they viewed the world as they experienced it, In the fourteenth century the visual arts had already become more realistic, The fourteenth-century Italian painters, particularly Giotto di Bondone, learned to give their figures shape and depth. (Fig. 7.1) They began

Figure 7.1 Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267~1337), Madonna with the In Jesus, Saint, and Angels (ca. 1305-1310 Giotto pioneer: newly realistic style of painting, giving tangible shape texture to his figures. (Alinari/Art Resource)

to paint the textures of skin and clothing in a sensuous manner so that the viewer could imagine the feel of the surface Renaissance humanist artists also recognized the importance of an a da proach that relied on direct, individual observation of ure. Lec Vinci (1452-1519), in his Treatise on Painting,

wrote

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since you know, painter, that you cannot be good if you are nota universal master at imitating by your art all the qualities of the forms that Nature produces—which you will not know how to do if you do not see and portray them in your mind—therefore, when you are walking through the countryside, turn your judgment to various objects, and look by turns at one thing and then another, making a selection of various such objects, culled out from those that are less good He also stressed careful observation and accurate portrayal of people in real life:

take delight in watching studiously those who talk together with gestures

of their hands. If you are personally acquainted with them, get close to them and hear what leads them to make such gestures as they do, . . . Pay

attention to those who laugh and those who cry, observe those who shout

with rage, and likewise all the conditions of our minds. Observe social manners and note that it is not appropriate for a master to act like a servant, nor a little child like an adolescent or likewise as an old man who.

can barely support himself; do not make a peasant’s gesture like one that should belong by custom to a nobleman, nor the strong man’s like the weak one’s, nor prostitutes’ gestures like those of honest women, nor men’s like women’s.

Also new and significant in Renaissance painting was the use of proportions to reflect visual perspective rather than symbolic organization, The sizes of figures in medieval art had established their hierarchical rankings, and the persons depicted did not necessarily seem to relate to one another in actual space, but people in Renaissance paintings began to relate as equals even though they appeared for the moment in different planes. Settings provided realistic contexts for figures, rather than extraneous ornament. Balance and symmetry of planning, not an ecclesiastically grounded cosmology, now fulfilled the artist's human urge to create order Perhaps most influential of all for music, the Renaissance produced a new interest in literature, for in writing one might find a means of self-expression This meant the elevation of the trivium in the educational system from its former modest position as the first and most elementary part of schooling (grammar school) to a position of honor. Responding to the demand for more and more copies of books, in the 1450s Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1395-1468)

developed the technique of printing from movable type. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1449-1515) produced editions of the Greek and Latin phi-

losophers, poets, and dramatists, as well as of the great Italian literature. The spread of literature increased the rate of literacy and, in turn, the possibility for original thought in response to what had been written in the past. Literature became closer to music; the modern conception of music as belonging to the

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same class of endeavors as literature (the humanities) has its roots here. As we shall see, musicians became deeply committed to words as the new basis for musical composition

The Hundred Years’ War and English Music on the Continent In 1337 King Edward III of England asserted his claim to the French throne of

Philip VI. This precipitated the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, which lasted from 1338 until 1453. The fighting laid waste to much of France, and even during periodic truces bands of momentarily unemployed mercenary soldiers lived off the land, pillaging farms and towns, For a number of years, much of France was actually under English control. The French finally found a rallying point in Joan of Arc, and their determination was only intensified by her capture and execution by the English in 1431. Still the war dragged on for over two decades. Such a political upheaval would not normally be conducive toa great flowering of the arts, for there was little leisure or money to spare when patrons of the muses became patrons of Mars, Yet in an unexpected way the Hundred Years’ War affected the development of musical styles, for it carried musicians from one region to another, effecting a cross-fertilization that might not have occurred otherwise The English brought their music to France with them, and the characteristic sound of English polyphony became very popular with the continental composers. In 1441-1442 a French poet, Martin le Franc, wrote in his Le

Champion des dames about the music of his countrymen before and after the influence of the English Tapissier, Carmen, Césaris Not so long since did sing so well That they amazed all of Paris And everyone who there did dwell But their discant did not possess A melody of such delight— They tell me, who can bear witness— As G. Dufay and Binchois write For they now have a novel way Of making brisk, sweet combinations In music soft, or loud and gay, In ficta, cadences, mutations, They have put on the countenance

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Of Englishmen, like Dunstable So that a wondrous elegance Makes their song glad and notable The “countenance of Englishmen"—le Franc uses the French phrase contehance anglotse—must have meant the English concentration on the imperfect consonances and avoidance of dissonance, also termed panconsonance. These mellifluous sonorities, so totally unlike the complicated harmonies of the Frenich mannerists of the late fourteenth century, conquered and held the ears and imaginations of the French while the English armies attained only a temporary grasp of the land John Dunstable

The composer John Dunstable (ca. 1390-1453) may have gone to France with the English regent in Paris, the Duke of Bedford: at least his music crossed the channel at this time. Dunstable was one of the greatest composers England has produced. He was probably educated in the great tradition of the medieval liberal arts, for he appears to have been active as a mathematician and astron-

omer. His great motet “Veni sancte spiritus/Veni creator spiritus” proves that

he mastered the French techniques of cantus firmus composition as well as the

esoteric mathematical intricacies of isorhythm and proportion.

At the same

time, he had such control of the harmony that even in the older style he could maintain the English panconsonant sound The panconsonant style must have appealed to the musicians on the continent because of the new humanist willingness to admit sensuous attrac-

tiveness as at least the equal of symbolic meaning in judging the value of music.

Given time to pursue the implications of humanist ideals, the French

composers might, of course, have turned in this harmonic direction on their own, As it happened, however, at the same time that Renaissance ideas filtered

into France from across the Alps, English armies and their music invaded from

across the channel and presented them with a sound that responded to the

needs of the burgeoning cultural movement. This happy coincidence produced a quite rapid revolution, which Le Franc could aptly describe as “putting on the countenance of Englishmen.” The New Style on the Continent

The composers whom Le Franc cites as representatives of the “novel way” of composing were associated by patronage with the territory of Burgundy, which included a large area of what is now northeastern France and the Low Countries. Their style has often been called Burgundian for this reason,

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though their travels and the dissemination of their music also spread their ideas in France and Italy. Burgundy was ruled by dukes who were related to the French royal family but generally avoided direct involvement in the Hundred Years’ War, preferring to play the English and French against one another to their own advantage. Because they did not deplete their resources in militaristic adventurism, they were able to cultivate a fabulous court, a center for music and other arts. (Fig. 7.2) The elaborate and affected styles of dress we often associate with the noble lords and ladies of fairy tales—peaked hats with veils and shoes with long, curled toes—stem from this period. At one especially lavish court banquet a huge pastry shell was presented, from which two dozen musicians played; hence came the “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked ina pie” of the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence.” But the legacy of the Burgundian dukes went far beyond fairy tales and nursery rhymes. They gathered to the protection of their court at Dijon some of the greatest artists and musicians of the fifteenth century. The Duke of Berry, brother to Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy (r. 1364-1404), commis-

sioned a breviary that ranks as one of the art masterpieces of the time, the so-called Trés riches heures du duc de Berry (1413-1416), which opens with

illustrations by the brothers Limbourg representing the months of the year. The miniature paintings depict scenes of everyday life in nature, using beautiful colorand amazing attention to detail, The religious pictures throughout the book also incorporate everyday scenes and depict specific locations within the Burgundian territories. (Plate 3)

Guillaume Dufay Most important of the musicians with ties to Burgundy was Guillaume Dufay (ca.

1400-1474).

Dufay was a singer and churchman rather than a courtier,

he was affiliated with the cathedral at Cambrai from the time he was a boy

chorister. He must have been well-educated, and he certainly traveled widely

He spent considerable time in Italy, including several different periods of

service as a singer in the papal choir in Rome. While in Italy he also came to

know some of the great noble patrons of the arts in the Renaissance

Sacred music is prominent in Dufay’s output, but the weakening of the

centripetal force of the church in the face of humanistic trends is also evident in these works. Dufay followed Dunstable, writing motets in the cantus firmus

style that made use of isorhythm and mathematical proportional relationships but also employed the new sonorities of imperfect consonances. By this time four-part texture was common, and the four voices were known as superius, contratenor altus (or simply altus), tenor, and contratenor bassus (or hassus), Latin versions of the Italian terms we still use. The addition of the contratenor

bassus below the fixed tenor was a great advantage to composers, for it allowed freedom to create harmonic sonorities from the lowest voice up. The

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Figure 7.2 Among the artistic leisure pursuits of the fifteenth-century aristocracy was tapestry weaving, This section of a three-part tapestry from Chaumont shows cometti, a portative organ, harp, lute, and singers. (Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift from Various Donors by Exchange, 60.176)

symbolic value of the cantus firmus as a foundation gave way to the desire for appealing vertical soun One of Dufay’s masterpieces in the fifteenth-century manner of handling the medieval motet framework is the magnificent motet “Nuper rosarum flores/Terribilis est locus iste,” composed for the dedication of the dome of the cathedral in Florence. (Fig, 7.3) Dufay’s motet tenor is laid out in four isorhythmic segments with mensural changes at each statement, in the proportions 6:4:2:3, which may have been intended to correspond to the proportions used in the architectural dimensions of Brunelleschi’s dome, The use of a chant tenor (taken from the Mass for the Dedication of a Church) and the use of isorhythmic technique look backward to the Middle Ages. The harmonic language, based on the pervasive sound of thirds, is progressive ‘Another new style in church music that also shows the increasing independence from medieval cantus firmus polyphony is the use of a paraphrased

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Figure 7.3 The great Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence was begun in 1294 but the late thirteenth-century builders of the body of the cathedral had left unsolved the problem of constructing the unprecedentedly huge dome that had been called for. The brilliant architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377— 1446) solved this problem with great ingenuity, and the construction was completed in 1436. Guillaume Dufay’s motet “Nuper rosarum flores/

Teribilis est locus iste,” for the cathedral’s dedication, employs in its music proportions resembling those of the architectural design. (Alinari/Art Resource) chant melody as the top voice in a polyphonic setting, In this type of piece the chant is handled freely, often with added notes to grace the simple, existing line. Two lower parts, moving in slower rhythm than the upper melody, but both at approximately the same pace, accompany the top voice. The distinction in style between these accompanying parts and the melody in the top voice suggests performance of the lower lines by instruments. The texture is that of the cantilena style used in the secular Italian music of the preceding

century. Humanism had obviously made subtle inroads into even the sacred

repertoire. The composers of the so-called Burgundian school, including Dufay, also

adapted the principle of English discant, but they now placed the chant in the

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topmost line. The method was to transpose the cantus toa relatively high pitch

and arrange a bottom voice to accompany it in sixths and, at cadences especially, at the octave. A middle voice would simply be improvised by singing from the chant line but a fourth lower, so that the whole texture produced a

polyphonic succession of § and § verticalities. The technique was called fauxbourdon (false bass). Pure homorhythm could be varied by giving the lowest voice a certain degree of independence, and the chant melodies were commonly paraphrased in a subtle fashion. Fauxbourdon verses were often used in alternation with chanted verses of hymns to provide variety; this manner of performance is known as alternatim

The gradual practice and the the cantus firmus fifteenth century

veering away from the ecclesiastical authority of liturgical creation ofa purely man-made order is further evidenced in Mass. Unlike the plainsong Mass of Machaut, Masses in the began to rely on a single cantus firmus for all their move-

ments, This undermined the liturgical integrity of the Mass in favor of purely musical unity, Sometimes the cantus firmus for all the movements was taken

from some ecclesiastical melody, but Dufay realized that once the liturgy had been abandoned there was no absolute need for a sacred cantus firmus, and he

thus employed secular tunes. He wrote one of his most famous Masses on the tenor of his own secular chanson “Se la face ay pale” (If | have a pale face) Another unifying device Dufay employed was to begin all the movements of the Mass with the same opening idea, a motto or head motive.

Dufay wrote fine secular music as well as sacred. Among these works are

chansons in the traditional formes fixes and cantilena texture. Often there are

extensive untexted, virtuosic passages in the melodic top voice, which suggests the use of instruments along with the singer, as well as in the lower voices. The forms are often more expansive than those of the earlier composers, for the sections tend to have several poetic lines each. What is really new about them, however, as in Dufay’s sacred works,

exploits the imperfect consonances

is their harmony, which

Gilles Binchois

The Binchois mentioned by Martin le Franc was Dufay’s contemporary Gilles Binchois (ca. 1400-1460), Unlike Dufay, Binchois was not a cleric (Fig. 7.4), and he naturally left relatively little sacred music. He was, in fact, a soldier, as well as a singer in the Burgundian ducal court. His chansons are particularly noteworthy for the gracefulness of their melodies Polyphonic Cadences

One stylistic move that would have important effects later in the history of music was experimentation with the polyphonic cadence. The $-8 cadence was still common, but during this time composers also tried other possibili-

The Rise of the Renaissance

ifficr Carmay

efarre

103

\

ae forat tepefir Bien haterct:

Oils feahiwent

tout Parte

Figure 7.4 Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois, portrayed in a manuscript of Le Champion des dames, in which they are praised by Martin le Franc as the finest composers of the new fifteenth-century style. Dufay is depicted in ecclesiastical robes with an organ, while Binchois, who excelled in secular music, is dressed as a courtier and hasa harp. (Bibliotheque nationale, Paris) ties. The harmonic combination of the second and seventh degrees of the mode in the penultimate harmony could be brought into closer correspondence with the lower partials in the overtone series, and thereby made to sound particularly attractive, by placing a bass note a fifth below the second degree (i. e., a major third or tenth below the raised seventh). This produced a 3 verticality just before the second and seventh opened out to the octave on the final (Ex. 7.1a). In three voices this presented the problem of what to do with the bass voice on the last note, and one solution was to carry it up an

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octave to make the fifth of the concluding§ harmony. This is sometimes called the octave-leap cadence (Ex. 7.1b) Example 7.1

Development of the cadence a. Addition of bass tone to major sixth before cadence

SS— b. Octave-leap cadence

c. Authentic cadence in four parts

= SS P ———— The bass could, of course, also rise a fourth or fall a fifth to the final as the stepwise upper parts moved outward, tripling the final at the cadence. This bass motion was more likely to occur, however, in a four-part setting, where the altus now commonly sustained the fifth of the mode in both cadential harmonies, and, of course, the final harmony still contained only perfect intervals, that is, octaves and fifths (Ex. 7.1c), It will easily be seen that what thus evolved from the old two-part contrapuntal cadence is the authentic cadence in four voices, It must not be overlooked, however, that the two basic cadential voices continuously maintained their dominance over the feeling of cadence throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Good voice leading at cadences continued to rely on this procedure until the twentieth century.

This period of Burgundian leadership was a transitional one, but it was extremely important in the history of Western music. During a period of turmoil in France, Burgundy was in a position to provide the nexus for interaction among French advanced compositional technique, English sonoral

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beauty, and Italian humanism. No longer truly medieval nor yet part of the mature Renaissance, early fifteenth-century polyphony provides an outstanding example of how music history incorporates both the interaction of music with general political and cultural history and the progress of purely musical ideas. Questions for Reflection

Why was the cultural division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance greater than any other break between historical periods since the begin ning of the Christian era? How did the travels of important individual musicians affect the history of music in the fifteenth century? How did the aesthetic meaning and musical function of the cantus firmus in polyphony differ in the Renaissance from its meaning and role in the music

of the Middle Ages?

Suggestions for Further Reading

For an overview of the Renaissance, see Friedrich Blume, Renaissance and Baroque Music (New York: Norton, 1967). A historical survey can be found in HowardM. Brown, Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1976). More detailed is Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1959) Excellent studies of individual composers are Margaret Bent, Dunstaple (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), and David Fallows, Dufay (London Dent, 1982)

THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

The Growth of the Renaissance Musical Style in the North

While the composers of the period of Burgundian leadership planted the seeds of a new musical style for the Renaissance, the growth of the style to its maturity belongs to the northwestern region of Europe that comprises modern Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and part of northern France. When it was no longer a battleground for French and English armies after 1453, this region was better able to cultivate the arts, By the end of the fifteenth century composers from this region dominated musical style all over Europe, and their leadership lasted until well into the sixteenth century. These composers may be grouped together as a Franco-Netherlands school, though, of course, their music manifests a variety of local and personal traits Johannes Ockeghem

The musical patriarch of these composers was Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1420-1497), a singer, composer, and directorat the royal court in Paris He had been a student of Dufay and possibly also of Binchois, and his own pupils and imitarors were legion. Ockeghem often followed the tradition of cantus firmus composition, particularly in some of his Masses. His motets sometimes also employed paraphrased chant material in the upper voices. The chansons, of which we have about twenty, frequently rely on the formes fixes Ockeghem’s fascination with the arcane aspects of compositional technique can be observed in his use of canon. In this case th

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not mean a roundlike composition, as it generally does today, but goes back to its original denotation and simply means a rule or instruction for realizing several parts out of only one thar is notated. Such an instruction might produce contrapuntal imitation, but that was only one of the aspects of the canon in the middle and late fifteenth century, For example, the canon could tell the performer to sing a given line backward at the same time it was sung forward (per motu contrario, “by contrary motion”, also called cancrizans, “crab motion"), to omit rests in the derived part, or to use rhythmic augmentation or diminution. The only limit on the possibilities was the ingenuity of the composer. Ockeghem’s masterpiece of canonic writing is his Missa prolationum, in which the voices sing the same melodic material under different mensural signatures. Often the canons were given as verbal conundrums, so that the performer would have to puzzle out the riddle first and then solve the musical problem, This sort of musical game playing fulfilled the natural desire for intellectual challenge in a new way that superseded the medieval reliance on isorhythmic treatment of a given tenor In his more forward looking pieces Ockeghem abandoned preexisting material and conventional forms in favor ofa freer, more empirical technique. This had been tentatively tried by some of his predecessors, but through his efforts it grew into the style of the future. Particularly in motets Ockeghem used a texture of four or five voices, all employing essentially the same melodic style, there is little attempt to relate the contrapuntal lines to each other. The voices all sing the same text, presenting it one grammatical phrase at a time, so that the result is a through-composed structure, The risk in this style is lack of coherence either in textural or formal terms. Musical unity arises from the grammatical sense of the words, of course, and from the long, flowing melodic writing that elides one phrase section into another so that choppiness is always avoided. Typical for this composer is the use of dense scoring in a relatively low register. (Ockeghem himself was a bass.) The somber thickness of the sound combines with the seamless, continuous flow of the lines to give the music a character that some listeners describe as mystical Jacob Obrecht

Younger than Ockeghem and more progressive in compositional style was Jacob Obrecht (1452-1505).

In several respects Obrecht's works are typically

clearer for the listener than Ockeghem’s. For one thing, the textures in his music are more transparent, partly because there are frequently passages where notall the available voices sing at once, and partly because they do not concentrate as much on the low registers. The melodic lines are more sharply defined; the phrases are more strongly directed and lead to more frequent cadences, Asa consequence the structural sections are shorter and more easily grasped. Obrecht also integrated the lines with each other by occasional pas-

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sages in which a gesture introduced in one voice is then imitated in another Each of these style traits became characteristic of the music of the High Renaissance in general Josquin des Prez and the Ars Pe

The greatest of Ockeghem's successors, and one of the greatest composers in Western music, was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1440-1521). A native of northern France, Josquin traveled to Italy, and, like Dufay, entered the most elevated circles of Italian Renaissance culture. The cities in which he worked included Milan, where he was a member of the cathedral choir and later served the

powerful Sforza family; Rome, where he sang in the papal choir; and Ferrara, where he became maestro di cappella (music director) to the Este family. Between the periods of work in Rome and in Ferrara, Josquin spent some time in France, probably including a term at the royal court in Paris, He spent the last years of his life in the Netherlands region, where he held a church post. His contemporaries considered Josquin the master composer of the current style Martin Luther wrote, “Josquin is master of the notes, which must express what he desires; on the other hand, other choral composers must do what the notes

dictate.” His genius in music was likened to that of Michelangelo in architecture, painting, and sculpture. He was apparently a strong-willed artist, for the agent of one of his prospective patrons advised hiring Josquin’s talented contemporary Heinrich Isaac (ca. 1450-1517), who was “able to get on with his colleagues better and composes new’ pieces more quickly.” “Josquin,” the agent reported, “composes better, but he does it when it suits him and not when one wishes him to.”

Certainly Josquin had an unprecedented mastery of scoring and harmony

The sound ideal for the Franco-Netherlands composers was that of an unac-

companied vocal ensemble in four, five, or occasionally six or more equal parts, Josquin’s compositions achieve transparency of texture by holding each voice part to a particular range. The ranges of adjacent voices relate approxi-

mately as the ambitus of corresponding authentic and plagal modes; that is, the tenor has about an octave beginning a fourth or fifth above the bottom of

the bass range, the alto lies about an octave above the bass, and the soprano

about an octave above the tenor. There is little crossing of parts to confuse the listener's ear.

Josquin’s handling of harmony was highly polished. The imperfect conso-

nances were accepted anywhere except at final cadences, so that the rich 3 and

§ sonorities were heard throughout.

Equally important, dissonance was

treated with great care. Dissonances were restricted to suspensions and passing tones on rhythmically weak beats. Josquin not only achieved perfect control of these aspects of the FrancoNetherlands style but also thoroughly integrated the contrapuntal lines and

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matched the musical structure precisely to the text. The techniques he developed became those of the entire following century and have been called the ars perfecta (perfect art) The problem of vertical coherence among the parts in polyphonic texture was solved by pervasive use of contrapuntal imitation, commonly called fuga. For each text phrase the composer constructed a melodic idea that could be carried through all the voice parts in turn. This point of imitation would conclude and give way to another. Thus the contrapuntal lines were audibly related to each other. To provide contrast for the passages in fuga, or for special emphasis, some phrases might be set homorhythmically in the manner called familiar style, the different voices declaiming the words simultaneously Each point of imitation generally concluded with some form of cadence corresponding to the punctuation of the text. Strong grammatical divisions, such as the ends of sentences, might be expressed by the authentic cadence progression and a rhythmic caesura; weaker punctuations could be handled by a more transitory conclusion, such as an incomplete cadential progression or the elision of text segments by allowing a new point of imitation to begin before the preceding one had concluded. The result of this was a sectional plan in which more and less sharp divisions were interspersed at the same rate as in spoken or written language, and this gave an overall sense of balance between continuity and articulation in form The importance of the text to the composer cannot be overemphasized. As we have just discussed, both the melodic ideas and the structure of the music derive from the text. Josquin stands out above his predecessors for the naturalness with which his melodic points of imitation reflect the words. Rhythm and melodic inflection in the music always respect the sound patterns of the spoken phrase. Such abuses of the text as rests between syllables of a word or at inappropriate places in the phrase are rigorously avoided. In some instances Josquin, and composers who followed his lead, also generated melodic ideas by depicting the meanings of the words—a mention of height or rising motion evoked an upward gesture in the melodic pitches, for example—but these devices are relatively subtle. Some writers in the sixteenth century referred to the thoroughgoing sensitivity to the relation between words and music as musica reservata, perhaps “reserved” in the sense that it was addressed to connoisseurs who would appreciate such subtleties. This area of composition gave a fruitful field for later generations, In his Masses Josquin also provides models for compositions based on sources other than the text itself. Since the composer had to set the Ordinary of the Mass again and again, he would soon exhaust the melodic inspiration the words could provide. Thus he would look elsewhere for ideas. In some cases this meant simply taking points of imitation, as an earlier composer might have taken a cantus firmus, from the chant repertoire; this method produced the great Missa Pange lingua, based on the melody of Thomas Aqui-

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nas’s important hymn. The two Missae homme armé are similarly contrived, but from a popular song that was also used in this way by numerous others. Somewhat more esoteric was the derivation of melodic material from solmiza-

tion, The Missa La sol fa re mi takes its melody froma musical pun on a lavorite

phrase of one of Josquin’s patrons (Lascia fare mi, Italian for “Leave it to me")

The process of soggetto cavato (subject carved out) could produce musical

readings of any words by matching the vowels with those of the hexachord

syllables; Josquin turned the name of his patron Duke Ercole of Ferrara into the Latin “Hercules dux Ferrariae" and then “carved out” the vowels to get the

hexachord syllables re ut re ut re fa mi re to provide the subject for another Mass.

A further technique for obtaining musical material was simply to appro-

priate substantial sections of an existing piece, adjusting the notes, reordering segments, and making any other changes necessary to underlay the Mass text

This was called contrafactum (compare the word counterfeit) or parody (from the Greek prefix para-, meaning “akin to,” and root aeidein, meaning “to sing”), but it did not have the modern connotation of an inferior imitation or mock-

ery. In fact, to parody a work of another composer could be regarded as a

means of paying homage to him. Josquin’s Missa D’ung aultre amer and Missa Malheur me bat parody chansons by his respected predecessor Ockeghem

Naturally, when a motet or secular song was parodied to create music for a Mass, the original intimate relation between words and music disappeared. By

way of compensation, the composer of the parody generally contributed increased musical complexity, perhaps by more thorough use of imitation or by

the addition of one more voice part to the texture

The Ascendancy of the Northern Style

During the last two decades of the fifteenth century and the first two of the sixteenth, composers who came from northern France and the Low Countries not only achieved the most polished manner of composition but also spread it through the whole of Europe. A typical composer's biography includes a youthful period of training in the north followed by a sojourn in Italy. In maturity the composer might rise to the peak of the profession in either of those two places or might travel still further to serve as musician to noble patrons in some other region who wished to have the best of Renaissance musical culture at their own courts. Heinrich Isaac managed to juggle a schedule that included work in Florence, where he served not only the church but also Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de Medici, and in Austria and Germany under the patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. The younger com-

poser Adrian Willaert (ca. 1490-1562) went from the Netherlands by way of

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a fine training at the royal court in Paris under Jean Mouton (ca. 1470-1522) to Italy,

where he followed Josquin’s trail to Rome, Ferrara, and Milan and

then became maestro di cappella at the great Basilica of St. Mark in Venice,

arguably the most prestigious directorship in sixteenth-century Europe

The ascendancy of the northern region in music means more, however,

than merely that these composers had more success and fame than those of other nations. The compositional technique practiced by Josquin’s contemporaries and perfected by him came to be the basis for all the styles of the following generations through the sixteenth century. As the technique was taken over by Willaert, it was codified in turn by his pupil (also a later director at St.

Mark’s),

the Italian Gioseffe Zarlino (1517-1590)

in his treatise Le

istitutioni harmoniche (Harmonic institutions, 1558), which became the classic

composition text of the century. The strength of the northern style, which we must now cal the cosmopolitan Renaissance style, can be explained on several different grounds In the preceding chapter we noted that the empirical appeal to the senses rather than to symbolism justified the adoption of imperfect intervals as consonances. It also caused the minimization of dissonance in a panconsonant harmonic syntax. For similarly empirical reasons, the medieval preeminence of triple rhythm, with its implication of divine perfection, steadily yielded to the more natural, “human,” duple rhythms of the heartbeat, respiration, and

walking

An interesting comparison might be made between the development of perspective in painting by fifteenth-century artists and the equal-voiced tex-

ture of High Renaissance music. (Fig. 8.1) As was remarked earlier, the relative size of figures in medieval art typically indicated their comparative importance

and had nothing to do with the way in which they might interact in actual space. This corresponds to the hierarchical rhythms of the cantus firmus, motetus, and triplum ina thirteenth- or fourteenth-century motet. With the rise of humanism artists no longer wished to express symbolic relations in an abstract view; they wanted to show the world from their own viewpoint. In perspective painting figures are understood to be the same size even though they appear foreshortened according to their distance from the observer. They might potentially relate to one another as equals, despite their momentary

situation in different visual planes. High Renaissance equal-voiced texture

adopts a comparable approach: The different voices occupy different spaces, but they are of equal value, and the listener's attention is free to hear the entire texture or to pass among them as they take up points of imitation We have also emphasized the importance of the text in music. Among other things, this forced the abandonment of the polytextual, cantus firmus— based, medieval type of motet, in which the texts could not be understood.

From the late fifteenth century on, the term motet denotes a setting of a Latin, sacred (or at least serious) text other than the Ordinary of the Mass.

The

Figure 8.1 The Virgin on the Throne with the Child and s, by the Flemi painter Hans Mem 1. 1430-1494), an approximate contemporary of Ockeghem, The use of perspective and the view of the outdoor scene behind the figures add to the realism and humanism of the painting. The angels in the foreground hold a vielle and a harp. (Seala/Art Resource)

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freedom from the cantus firmus allowed clear declamation and flexible interpretation of the words, so that the rich poetry of the Renaissance humanist writers could be fully appreciated in music. The following generations of the sixteenth century became fascinated to the point of fixation with the possibiliies for relating music to literary texts and explored this relationship in a variety of facets.

Music for Social Use in the High Renaissance Among the effects of the Renaissance on music was a rapid increase in the

demand for secular repertoire. The growing power and wealth of the nobility gave them at least equal footing with that of the church for patronage of the arts. More important, the invention of an efficient method of printing had the same effect on music as it had already had on literature, The first publication

of music from movable type was released by Ottaviano de Petrucci (1466— 1539) of Venice in 1501.

This publication, Harmonice musices odhecaton A,

consisted of a collection of Franco-Netherlands-style chansons.

(The Greek

term odhecaton means “one hundred songs,” but actually there were only

ninety-six.) It is significant that the Odhecaton, as it is sometimes known, contained secular music. The needs of churches did not suddenly change; they could still be met by manuscript copies as they had in the past. Petrucci sensed that there was a large new market for secular part-songs, and his guess turned out to be accurate. OdhecatonA had to be reprinted in 1503 and 1504, and the

sequels Canti B and Canti C appeared immediately. Soon other printers followed Petrucci’s example, making music available to less wealthy households throughout Europe; most important among these were Pierre Attaingnant (ca. 1494-1552) in Paris and Tylman Susato (ca.

1500-1560) in Antwerp.

The

demand for more music for this commercial market immediately affected

composers by reorienting their efforts toward secular genres. In addition, their compositional styles now had to respond to the abilities, tastes, and imaginations of a new class of singers, primarily amateurs seeking domestic amusement

Music was regarded as so important a leisure occupation for the educated classes in the High Renaissance that one appeared uncouth if one could not participate in musical discussions and diversions. Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) described the ideal Italian aristocrat in Il cortegiano (The court-

ier) in 1528. He recommended that the courtier leam to sing a part in poly-

phonic songs, know something of string instruments, and particularly be able to sing with the accompaniment of the lute. He also stressed that this noble

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115

paragon should be so skillful that he could sing or play. as he did everything with a certain sprezzatura or nonchalance that would suggest that he could toss off the most difficult tasks with careless ease. In his A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), the English composer, theorist, and music publisher Thomas Morley (1557 or 1558-1602) began with a humorous, quasi-dramatic dialogue between two brothers (probably not nablemen but upwardly mobile members of the middle class), one of whom has been so embarrassed by his ignorance of both music theory and practice that he has resolved to study the art before he presents himself again in polite society pouyMarues. Stay, brother Philomathes, what haste? Whither go you so fast? PrILOMATHES:

To seek out an old friend of mine.

pot. But before you go I pray you repeat some of the discourses which you had yestemight at Master Sophobulus his banquet, for commonly he is not without both wise and learned guests rit It is true indeed, and yesternight there were a number of excellent scholars, both gentlemen and others, but all the propose which then was discoursed upon was music Po I trust you were contented to suffer others to speak of that matter. ra Twould that had been the worst, for | was compelled to discover mine own ignorance and confess that 1 knew nothing at all in it Pou: How so? pu. Among the rest of the guests, by chance master Aphron came thither also, who, falling to discourse of music, was in an argument so quickly taken up and hotly pursued by Eudoxus and Calergus, two kinsmen of Sophobulus, as in his own art he was overthrown; but he still sticking in his opinion, the two gentlemen requested me to examine his reasons and confute them; but I refusing and pretending ignorance, the whole company condemned me of discourtesy, being fully persuaded that I had been as skilful in that art as they took me to be learned in others. But supper being ended and music books (according to the custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that 1 could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up, so that upon shame of mine ignorance I go now to seek out mine old friend Master Gnorimus, to make myself his scholar! It was for such amateur musicians as these that the sixteenth-century compos-

ers produced myriad secular compositions, ranging in content from ribald

thymes to sophisticated sonnets and in musical style from lively, popular

dance tunes to complicated intellectual masterpieces.

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Chapter 8 Regional Variations of the Cosmopolitan Style in Secular Music

After the peak of its influence in the early decades of the sixteenth century, the international style of the northern composers became a point of departure for a variety of regional substyles in secular genres. The music of the composers who remained in the Low Countries did not change rapidly, and therefore it soon became more conservative than that of other areas. Their chansons retained the smooth, panconsonant, polyphonic flow and continuously untolding rhythm of the motet The French Chanson

In France a special kind of approach to sung texts affected the compositional style of the chanson. As illustrated by the works of Paris court composer Claudin de Sermisy (ca. 1490-1562), the French focussed on the clear and accurate declamation of the poetic syllables. In attempting to treat the words with perfect clarity, the composers favored familiar-style treatment, with all voices articulating the syllables simultaneously. A simplified or schematic realization of the natural speech rhythms of the language determined durational values, With poetic texts of consistent line construction, this yielded predictably patterned phrases and therefore in some cases a dancelike character. So many French chansons began with a dactylic (long-short-short) rhythm that that rhythmic gesture became a recognizable trademark of the genre Another technique in sixteenth-century French chansons, the use of musical onomatopoeia, recalls the fourteenth-century caccia and chace. Particularly notable for this device is Clément Janequin (ca. 1485-1558), who asked

his singers to create clever and amusing sound effects, His “La guerre” illustrates a battle; “Le chant des oiseaux" is a catalogue of different birdsongs

English Music After the end of the Hundred Years’ Wat, England drew back across the English Channel and became somewhat isolated from the development of the cosmopolitan musical style on the continent. We have relatively little secular music from England at this time, though it was certainly cultivated at the court; Henry VIII himself composed some songs. Carols continued to be popular, The English style did not achieve the sensitivity to text or the structural coherence of the French and Netherlandish music of Josquin’s time and later; the use of imitation to relate the contrapuntal lines to each other occurs less pervasively. In addition, English music is much more likely to break into extended melismas than the music on the continent

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German Music

The song practice of Germany appears more closely bound to the past than that of other areas, As we have mentioned before, the monophonic tradition of the Minnelied was continued by the middle-class Meistersinger, who formed themselves into a musical guild like the well-established craft guilds and with rigorous dedication preserved in their Lieder the old form of the Bar

The greatest of the Meistersinger, Hans Sachs (1494-1576), pursued the pro-

fession of master shoemaker in Niirberg as well as composinga large output of words and music. Nearly three centuries after his death he reappeared as the central character of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg.

The secular polyphonic compositions of the German Renaissance, also called Lieder, stuck to an older style. They commonly rely on a preexisting tune in the tenor voice, presented in relatively slow-moving note values. In numerous cases there was a pair of voices in canonic imitation. Three-part scoring was still common, though a freely composed bass gave the harmony independence from the cantus firmus. A popular device was to combine several different popular song melodies into a single composition to produce a quodlibet (Latin for “whatever you like”) The Italian Frottola and Madrigal

In the period of the advent of the Franco-Netherlands style, Italy already had a popular musical genre, the frottola. These songs used vernacular poetry and dealt with amorous or satirical topics. Their settings were straightforward and syllabic, in familiar style, with orientation toward the top voice. They may have been sung as part-songs by several voices or performed by solo voice with instruments taking the lower parts, Characteristically their rhythms were strongly patterned in the manner of dance music. The harmony was simple and diatonic. Structurally the frottola adopted strophic form in several verses. Native composers naturally dominated in this light genre, but Josquin did not disdain to try his hand at it when he was in Italy. The old spiritual lauda, now given a polyphonic texture, provided a religious counterpart of the frottola similar in style but generally a bit less lively, as suited its content. In the second quarter of the sixteenth century there arose in Italy one of the great genres of social music making, the madrigal. The madrigal was sophisticated vocal chamber music and a high-class art form, unlike the more popular frottola, The emergence of the madrigal depended on the convergence of three different factors: the polyphonic chanson style brought by the northern composers to Italy, the demand for music to be used in social contexts by wealthy and educated amateurs, and the cultivation of excellent poetry by the Italian Renaissance writers. The sonnets of Petrarch from the fourteenth century inspired humanist poets of the sixteenth century to imitate and excel the father of Italian vernacular love poetry

M8

Chapter 8 In the first stage of the history of the madrigal, immigrant northern com-

posers took up Italian poetry and graced it with their own musical style. The

madrigals of Jacques Arcadelt (ca. 1505-1560), a Flemish composer who for atime led the papal choir in Rome, provide good examples. These madrigals

are quite simple and restrained, using almost exclusively syllabic text settings

and diatonic harmony. They resemble the Franco-Netherlands motet, except that, like the contemporary Parisian chanson, they are somewhat inclined to

use familiar style rather than fuga, which gives them a more defined rhythmic

sense. The music reflects with great sensitivity the declamation, grammatical structure, and verse structure of the poetry. Its generally diatonic idiom and natural vocal lines obviously were intended to meet the needs of amateur

performers. Somewhat more complex are the madrigals that Adrian Willaert composed in Venice at approximately the same time that Arcadelt was writing, By the middle of the century the madrigal had increased in expressivity

and complexity. The poets began to explore a more impassioned poetic tone, and composers matched them with increased musical sophistication; the leading composer of this more sophisticated stage in the madrigal was Cipriano de Rore (1516-1565), Willaert’s immediate successor as maestro di cappella at St. Mark's. In this second period of the madrigal’s development, melodic gestures and rhythm increasingly imitated images of gesture and motion in the

poetry. Harmonic evocation of moods grew more common: The general resolution of the church modes into the broad classes of major and minor began

to take place, and composers recognized the optimistic expressive tendency of the major and the depressed character of the minor modes. Chromaticism was also exploited for expressive reasons. Word painting was especially cultivated, following Aristotle’s dictumn (Po-

etics) that art should consist of a mimesis (imitation) of life. In some cases the

word painting was reserved to the readers of the parts, as when short values, requiring black noteheads, were used to express darkness, or semibreves on the same pitch, by that time drawn as round rather than mond-shaped notes, appeared when the text mentioned the lover's eyes.

note two diaThis

“eye music” (sometimes called by the German name Augenmusik) obviously

would mean nothing to an audience, but the madrigal was addressed to the

singers, and an audience was not really anticipated. A look at Rore’s madrigals

makes it clear that performers who sang these pieces at sight with any degree

of the sprezzatura that Castiglione demanded worked hard at their musical skills.

of the courtier must

have

The Poetic Model for Musical Expression

We have several times emphasized the importance of texts for composers of the Renaissance. It is no exaggeration to say that one cannot possibly under-

The High Renaissance — 119

stand what is going on in a piece of sixteenth-century music unless one first understands the text.

The aesthetic by which this connection manifested itself in the Renais

sance can be appropriately identified as poetic. By imitating the rhythmic and inflective patterns of the text, the musical points of imitation reinforce the

delight in beautiful sound patterns that makes poetry musical. The periodiza-

tion of the musical structure according to the lines of the text similarly lends the music a pace that imitates that of poetry. Most of all, the employment of musical mimesis of word meanings to generate musical ideas captures in the

most vivid and concrete fashion the idea of the poetic image Zarlino made this clear in Le istitutioni harmoniche.

authority for the principle

He cited Plato as his

the harmonies ought to accompany the words, for this reason: Although it was said . . . , according to Plato’s opinion, that melody is made up of speech, harmony, and rhythm, and that in such a combination one of these things should not take precedence over another, nevertheless he places speech before the other parts, as the principal thing, and the other two parts as those that serve it He also stressed that word meanings are to be reflected in harmony and choice of mode: For if in speech . . . matters may be dealt with that are happy or sad, or serious and also without any seriousness, or similarly chaste or lascivious, it follows that we must also select a harmony and a rhythm suitable to the nature of the matters that are contained in the speech, so that from the combination of these things, mixed together with proportion, there will result a melody suited to the subject matter One will know best how to do this when he has paid attention to what I have written . . . and has considered the nature of the mode in which he wants to write his song, He should do his best to accompany each word in such a way that, where it denotes harshness, hardness, cruelty, bitterness, and other similar things, the harmony will be similar to it—that is, somewhat hard and harsh, but in sucha manner that it is not offensive; likewise, when any of the words expresses weeping, sadness, grief, sighs, tears, and other similar things, that the harmony will be full of sadness And both declamation of the words and grammatical sense must also be con-

sidered:

we should in such a heard—as declaimed declaimed

be sure to suit the words of the speech to the melodic figures manner, with such note values, that nothing barbarous is in a case when a long syllable in the vocal line has to be on a short note, or, on the other hand, a short one has to be long

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Likewise, one should be careful not to separate any parts of the speech from each other with rests, as some not very intelligent people do, as long as the clause or any part of it is not finished in such a way that the sense of the words is complete, And one should not make a cadence— especially one of the main ones—and not put ina rest longer than that of the minim, if the sentence is not complete, The significance of this for the history of music aesthetics is enormous; it brought about one of the great dividing points of music history. The aesthetic break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was deeper than that

between any of the periods that followed, until our own era. While until the

fifteenth century music was governed by numbers and religious symbolism, after the fifteenth century it was governed by words and literature. The medi-

eval composer was an architect in tones: the Renaissance composer became a musical poet, When music gave up its mathematical affiliations for poetic ones, it became no longer symbolic but expressive. It no longer mirrored the perfection of divine order but embodied the experience of mankind. It be-

came, in short, humanist.

So long-lasting was this new outlook that the link between literature and music remained indissoluble until the twentieth century. This complementary relationship produced a great variety of aesthetic interpretations, but never between about 1500 and 1900 was the fundamental assumption abandoned

that, as the English writer Henry Peacham (ca. 1576-1643) put it, music is “a sister to poetry.”

Questions for Reflection

= Compared to earlier periods how strongly did national taste, the predilections of particular patrons, and the personalities of composers affect the style of music in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How did the printing of music affect musical style in the sixteenth and following centuries? Were there any ways in which music printing might have had a negative impact on music? In what ways did the relationship of music to words increase the vitality of music in the sixteenth century? What might music have lost in exchange? * Ithas been said that the Renaissance invented the artist, as opposed to the artisan (see Chapter 23). What does this statement mean for the musician and for music?

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Excerpts from the writings of Morley and Zarlino can be found in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950), see also Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. Alec Harman (New York: Norton, 1973), and Gioseffe Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche, Part 3, The Artof Counterpoint, trans. GuyA. Marco and C. V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) and Part 4, On the Modes, trans. Vered Cohen and ed. C. V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) An important book on secular vocal music in the High Renaissance is James Haar, ed., Chanson and Madrigal, 1480-1530 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). Allred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971) is a standard work. A more concise survey is Jerome Roche, The Madrigal (New York: Scribner's, 1972) On Josquin des Prez, see Edward E, Lowinsky and Bonnie J. Blackburn, eds., Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Festival-Conference Held at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center in New York City, 21-25 June 1971 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976)

Notes

1. Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easy Intvoduction to Practical Music, ed. Alec Harman (New York: Norton, 1973), 9

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC IN THE RENAISSANCE

The Place of Instruments in Renaissance Music

From a philosophical point of view, instrumental music might seem to hold a difficult position in the Renaissance.

Since the relationship of

words and music dominated Renaissance musical thinking both in aes-

thetics and composition, instrumental music might have been pushed

into the background as a kind of awkward stepsister to vocal music. As in any age, however, musicians did not let mere philosophy hamper

their imaginations or quell their creative urges. Players took out their instruments every day without stopping to worry about how music

achieved its beauty, structure, or expressive value in the absence of words. And there were interesting developments in the abstract world of textless music that influenced the future in many ways

Renaissance Instruments

The classification of instruments into haut and bas types continued from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. New in the sixteenth century was an incipient sense of planned scoring, The homogeneous sound of vocal a cappella music was reflected in the grouping into choirs of instruments ofa single type but different sizes and ranges. This system still affects the way composers think about timbres and plan instrumentation

123

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Chapter 9 Consorts

Builders constructed matched sets of instruments, forming a chest or, in actual

performance together, a consort. One could purchase a set of recorders, for

example, that would allow the playing of four-part compositions for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

There were two types of double-reed instruments. One was the old, loud shawm family, generally used outdoors. The other type, much softer and more suitable for indoor playing, was the family of crumhorns (from the German krumm, meaning “crooked").

The crumhorn differs from the shawm in three

prominent respects: Its bore is cylindrical rather than conical; its reed is enclosed inside a wooden cap rather than being held directly in the player's mouth; and the end is not broadly flared but curves outward in a graceful are (Fig. 9.1)

All in all, the types of woodwinds and the variety of tone colors available

was considerable, The schreierpfeife resembled shawms but had capped reeds.

There were also two major types of bass reed instruments, belonging to the type with a tube that folded back on itself, a group known as kortholts. One was

the racket, which had its length compacted inside a small cylinder held between the player's hands.

The other, known as the dulcian or curtal, was a

simpler predecessor of the modern bassoon. The transverse flute continued to be used from the Middle Ages throughout the Renaissance and on to the present. Prominent in the brass and lip-vibrated class is the sackbut, predecessor of

the modern trombone. The sackbut had a narrow bore and a gently flared bell and consequently made a much softer tone than the trombone, Often com-

bined in consorts with alto, tenor, and bass sackbuts was the cornett (in Italian, cornetto; in German, Zink). As its name suggests, the cornett was, at least at first, simply a small animal horn; holes were drilled along its length so that it

could be fingered like a recorder, shawm, or crumhorn, and a cup mouthpiece was placed at the small end. Later cornetts were made of wood.

The sound of

the instrument is quite restrained, not at all like the brassy brilliance of the modern trumpet. It was used to accompany choral music, because its sound

seemed well matched to the sound of the voice.

The Renaissance bowed string instruments, or viols, also came in chests.

Viols differ from the instruments of the modern violin family in several impor-

tant respects; in fact they are related to the guitar in certain ways, for they have

six strings, a fretted fingerboard, and a flat back. In addition, the shoulders of the viol are much more sloped than those of the violin, viola, and cello. The

treble viol sat upright on the player's lap. The larger ones were held between

the player's legs and consequently were known in Italian as viola da gamba or

“leg viol.”

(Fig. 9.2) A double bass viol, called violone in Italian, was also used,

Instrumental Music in the Renaissance.

125

Figure 9.1 A set of crumhors

and itis the legitimate ancestor of the modern double bass, By the end of the sixteenth century the violin, with its more penetrating tone and greater flexibility, began to come into use Broken Consorts

While much music was played by homogeneous consorts of instruments, there was also the possibility of a mixed or “broken” consort comprising instruments of various families, within the constraints of the haut/bas dichotomy. The players were practical, and the indication of specific scorings simply ‘was not a component of Renaissance musical style. By the end of the sixteenth century in England, however, there was a standard broken consort grouping, which included one or more recorders, both plucked and bowed string instruments, and keyboard instrument. Plucked Instruments

A variety of plucked string instruments were available. The lute and all its relatives were now plucked with the fingers of the right hand rather than with a plectrum as in the Middle Ages, making possible the performance of polyphonic music by a single player. An elongated neck and additional strings allowed the lute’s cousins the archlute and the larger-bodied chitarrone or theorbo an extended bass range. The vihuela, ancestor of the modern guitar, dominated the scene in Spain.

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Chapter 9

Figure 9.2 Treble and tenor viols. Keyboard Instruments

The Renaissance was the period in which keyboard instruments other than the organ arose. Mechanically simplest of these was the clavichord, the strings of which were touched by metal tangents attached directly to the backs of the keys. The clavichord has a very small, intimate tone. The harpsichord is more practical as an instrument to be played for an audience or in ensembles. Each of its keys activates a jack, which holds a plectrum made of quill, The result is a relatively brilliant and strongly articulated sound. The virginal, a small, boxlike harpsichord with strings running at right angles to the keys, was popular in England. The organ, of course, continued to be used in the church, but it was largely replaced by the harpsichord in secular contexts Tablature

Vocal polyphony in the Renaissance was usually read from part-books, each singer having only his own line, as modern instrumental ensemble players generally do, rather than the full score that today’s choral singers use. This arrangement was also employed in consort music. For solo playing, such as on the plucked strings, part-books were, of course, impossible, and score notation was impractical. A special notation called tablature was developed particularly for lute and vihuela players Rather than giving the playera graphic picture of the musical sound (like the pitches on a staff) or a symbolic indication of the tones (such as the note

Instrumental Music in the Renaissance

127

shapes that indicate duration), tablature instructs the player where to place the fingers. (Modern guitar chord diagrams employ the same principle but with much less precision.) The basic principle of tablature was to show the reader a picture of the six strings as six horizontal lines and assign a letter or number

to each fret on the neck of the instrument. The player stopped the string at the

fret corresponding to the letter or number placed on that line and plucked that string, Rhythm would be indicated by stems and flags placed above the tablature. (Fig. 9.3) Tablature is, of course, eminently practical, but it is extremely difficult if not impossible to imagine simply by looking at the notation what the music sounds like. One must play the music to reveal the musical lines and

their polyphonic interplay.

The use of tablature was also adapted for keyboard players. However, they

sometimes read from a two-staff score or, occasionally, from a larger score showing each of the polyphonic parts (partitura).

Instruments and Vocal Music It was common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to perform vocal works

with instruments, The instruments might simply double parts as they were sung. This allowed those without vocal gifts to participate in secular, domestic music making. In churches, although the a cappella sound remained the ideal,

the choral lines were regularly supported by the organ, sackbuts, and other

appropriate instruments

Sometimes in polyphonic vocal music instruments played some lines while singers took others. This might happen simply because players were available and vocalists were not, and details such as the absence of a singer

should not deter the performance of a song with, for example, only a viol on

the bass line. As we have remarked before, numerous pieces seem to call for

the combination of solo voice and instruments, though such a scoring is not specified. Among these are the cantilena-style chansons of the Burgundian

composers, the Italian frottole of the early sixteenth century, and some of the

sixteenth-century French chansons, As the sixteenth century continued, more

pieces were specifically written for combined voices and instruments, so that we have a wealth of music for solo voice and lute; some songs for voice and

keyboard; and, especially from England, consort songs for singer and viols. Instrumental Adaptations of Vocal Music and Genres

The richness of the vocal music literature invited instrumentalists to adapt that music for their own use. They certainly played from the singers’ part-books to

Figure 9.3 da Milano, Intavolatura de A ricercar for lute, notated in tablature. (Francesco viola o vero lauto. Naples, 1536)

supplement their own repertoire. To adapt the music to their instruments or make it more attractive they composed transcriptions of vocal pieces. This was especially common among lute and keyboard composers and players For original works the composers took the vocal genres as their models.

The instrumental ricercar (from the Italian for “to seek out,” cognate with

research”) imitated the motet in treating contrapuntal points of imitation one by one in a succession of dovetailed periods. The canzona was modeled on the French chanson, with much use of familiar style and even the characteristic opening dactylic rhythm of the vocal genre. Of these two types, the ricercar was more complex and serious, while the canzona was livelier and more lighthearted English musicians developed a unique and rather peculiar adaptation of a vocal source in instrumental music. Apparently composers especially liked a particular phrase from the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas of one of their greatest native sons,

John

Taverner (ca.

1490-1545).

That phrase was the setting of

the words in nomine from the statement “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” in the Sanctus. Transcriptions of the passage and new pieces using

Instrumental Music in the Renaissance.

129

the melody asa cantus firmus were so numerous that they amount to an entire

genre of instrumental pieces known simply as In nomine,

The grounding of much Renaissance instrumental music in vocal style and

vocal genres reflects how far advanced vocal music was beyond instrumental music. The words themselves had solved basic problems of musical sense and

structure for vocal music. By adapting the vocal genres to their own use, instrumentalists took advantage of the musical structures at which composers

of vocal works had previously arrived. There were new problems with this

approach, however. The sense of musical ideas generated by word meanings

or by the natural diction of phrases and sentences did not necessarily carry over convincingly into abstract tone-patterns in instrumental ricercars and

canzonas. Even more perplexing was the difficulty of achieving structural coherence without a text, for the through-composed approach to form threatened to leave instrumental music merely wandering from one musical point to

another without logical connections.

Instrumental Genres Dances

As it was in the Middle Ages, dance music was a very important type of purely

instrumental music in the Renaissance. Such pieces might be either practical ones actually intended to accompany dancing or independent pieces created by using the patterns of dance music in a stylized fashion. (The latter approach

is not different in concept from Chopin's in his composition of waltzes, polo-

naises, and mazurkas for the piano.) A popular dance type in France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the basse danse; it was also common in Italy, where it was called bassadanza. This was a smooth, gliding dance for

couples, generally using some form of triple rhythm. (Fig. 9.4)

Often Renaissance dances come in pairs that match a slower dance with

a faster one. In Italy the bassadanza was replaced by the slow passamezzo,

which was paired with a vigorous fast dance called saltarello. In France the slow dance came to be known as pavane, while the more animated one was the

gaillarde. The passamezzo and pavane most commonly used duple meters,

while the saltarello and gaillarde had compound meters and exploited hemiola. These dances were also popular in England as pavan and galliard The pairing of pieces in this fashion is significant, for it demonstrates that

the instrumental musicians had begun to deal with the problem of shape and direction in a multisectional musical construction. Variety and contrast are provided by the different rhythmic characters of the dances, while their order offers a sense of forward motion and climax.

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Figure 9.4

Renaissance dancers accompanied by shawms, (Bibliotheque nationale, Paris)

Variations

Another popular instrumental type was the variation set. Composers often treated song tunes or dances in series of variations. Because dances typically had standard phrase lengths corresponding to the prescribed sequences of steps, 1t was not so much their tunes that were varied as their harmonic plans or conventional bass patterns. The techniques of variation naturally exploited the idiomatic capabilities of the instrument for which the set was composed and the virtuosity of the composer or performer. The variation set also manifests the need of instrumental composers to come to grips with problems of coherence and variety that composers of vocal music did not have to solve. In a series of variations the twin principles of unity and contrast are both applied effectively. A master composer could produce a sense of large-scale shaping by organizing many short variations

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into groups and by employing a rhythmic or textural crescendo toward the end of the set Instrumental Pieces in the Style

of Improvisations

Improvisatory pieces formed another class of instrumental compositions. The rise of virtuoso technique, especially on lute or vihuela and on keyboard instruments, led to the creation of many such works. These pieces might bear

titles such as fantasia, reflecting the untrammeled freedom of the imagination

exercised in the composition, or toccata (Italian for “touched,” usually refer-

ring to the keys of a harpsichord or organ), implying that the piece featured facile fingering, The term ricercar also appears for such improvisational pieces,

as well as for the polyphonic, “vocal” type discussed earlier. In Spain such compositions were known as tiento (from tentar, “to feel out")

Players often used such improvisatory pieces to introduce more structured instrumental or vocal pieces. Such a piece might be called intonazione, which suggests that its purpose was either to provide the pitch for a performance or to check the intonation of the instrument itself before starting another, more formal number. Other common titles were prelude and preambulum, simply indicating that the piece was to be played before something else

Naturally there was relatively little concern for principles of musical form within these improvisatory pieces. Nevertheless, the combination of such a free introduction with another, more systematically constructed piece constitutes an important contribution of the Renaissance instrumental composers and players to the development of musical form after the sixteenth century

Questions for Reflection What elements of Renaissance instruments and instrumental practice are closest to those of the Middle Ages? Which anticipated later instrumental

usage in the period of common practice?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of tablature notation compared to the standard notation instrumentalists use today? =

How

would

Renaissance

humanistic

thought and sound

ideals have

changed the practice of instrumental music in the church compared to such

practice in the Middle Ages?

= What ideas did vocal music contribute to instrumental musical structures and processes in the Renaissance? What did dance contribute?

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Chapter 9 Suggestions for Further Reading

For discussions of Renaissance instruments, see the Suggestions for Further Reading for Chapter 4. On early keyboard music, see Willi Apel, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. Hans Tischler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) Investigations of performance problems include J. A. Bank, Tactus, Tempo, and Notation in Mensural Music from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (Amsterdam: Annie Bank, 1972); Andrew Hughes, Ficta in Focus; Manuscript Accidentals 1530-1450 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1972); and Howard Mayer Brown, Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music (London: Oxford

THE REFORMATION

The Background of the Reformation

The turmoil in the Catholic church that had been growing for centuries finally came to a crisis in the sixteenth century. The institution of the church had somehow held together despite its leaders’ obvious abuses of

money, political power, and morality, However, these abuses could last

only as long as thought was founded on the authority the church claimed. The rise of humanism and the emphasis on independent

thought in the Renaissance inevitably led to doubts and arguments that would challenge the church itself. Scholars who read the classics in the

original languages also read the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek and discovered ideas there that contradicted received doctrine.

In the

competition between authority and the scholar's own reading and rea-

son, the latter naturally prevailed

The immediate cause of the catholic church’s downfall was the sell-

ing of indulgences, which allowed wealthy sinners to ease their journey to heaven in the next life by paying money to the church in the present

one. Martin Luther (1483-1546) read the New Testament letters of the

apostle Paul and found in them the doctrine that no amount of human

merit could offer salvation, but only the grace of God. He exposed indulgences as the basest kind of extortion, serving to fill the coffers of Rome

rather than to promote salvation. Luther's posting of his famous Ninety-

five Theses on the door of the collegiate church at Wittenberg in 1517

turned out to be the point of no return in the church's slide from absolute power.

The Reformation also had roots in the growing sense of nationalism

in Europe. The papacy had long been a prize held alternately—during

the Great Schism, simultaneously—by Italy and France. The northern and eastern parts of Europe, as well as England, naturally resented this 133

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and, quite reasonably, saw in it a form of foreign political oppression. Thus

when the theological attack on the Roman church came, it quickly found support among the general populace in these spiritually disenfranchised areas,

The bloody German Peasants’ Revolt was a product of political frustration combined with the Reformation’s spiritual inspiration. (Plate 4) Henry VIII,

unable to obtain from the pope an annulment of a fruitless marriage, declared

spiritual independence from Rome in the 1534 Act of Supremacy and made himself head of the Church of England.

Consequently, both the Roman church and the reformed church were

quickly fragmented. There were followers of Luther in Germany and Scandinavia: groups led by Jean Calvin (1509-1564) and Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and parts of

Germany; and pockets of more radical Anabaptists in many areas. For the

history of music this meant the growth of a variety of practices and musical styles and repertoires, Each denomination had its own ideas about music, which sprang from the theological position and musical inclinations of its leadership The Music of the Lutheran Reformation

Martin Luther's original intention was not to divide the church but to reform it from within. He had come from the Roman Catholic tradition and never doubted the value of music in religious life and liturgy. He himself was a music lover and amateur musician; he played the lute and the flute. He also strongly endorsed the use of music in the education of young people. Luther's main concerns about worship itself were the church’s exclusion of the common person through its emphasis on secretive, mysterious rites; its vast and complicated liturgy; and its stubborn insistence on the use of Latin rather than the language of the people. To respond to this concern, Luther contrived a new liturgy in 1526. The Deutsche Messe (German Mass) was modeled on the Gregorian liturgy and music, but it was simplified and translated into the vernacular. Even this was intended not as a replacement for the Latin Mass, but only as an alternative to it for use in smaller churches Luther promoted hymns for congregational and devotional singing. These hymns in the Lutheran tradition are known as chorales. The chorale actually consists of a strophic text and a melody. Luther took on the task of writing some chorale texts himself; his most famous is “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A mighty fortress is our God). He may have composed the music for this and some other chorales. He also had an important musical collaborator in Johann Walter (1496-1570). Published collections of Reformation chorales appeared as early as 1524. In German music the chorales took on an importance similar to that of the chant in music prior to the Reformation. (Fig. 10.1)

The Reformation

135 §o 3,

Cheiftwm wie follen loben fdyon/dee Keinenmagd Warten fon/fo weit die

ee

lie be Gon ne leudyt/ wnd analy po sy weed lee welt os

de reldyt.

&

Der

Figure 10.1 Two pages from a German chorale collection of 1533. As the woodcut indicates, the music shows the first stanza of a Christmas chorale:

“We should

praise Christ, the son of the spotless maiden Mary, as far as the sun shines and reaches to all the ends of the earth.”

The chorale was adapted from the

Gregorian hymn “A solis ortus cardine,” sung at Lauds on Christmas morning,

(Staatliche Lutherhalle, Wittenberg)

The chorale melodies were sometimes brand-new compositions by the reformed composers. The need for a large quantity of music on short notice, however, also led to the borrowing or adaptation of Gregorian melodies with, of course, German words. The Latin Easter Sequence, “Victimae paschali laudes,” for example, was parodied in this fashion to create the Lutheran chorale “Christ lag in Todesbanden” (Christ lay in death's bonds); the Advent chorale “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (Now come, the nations’ savior) came from the Latin hymn “Veni, redemptor gentium” (Come, redeemer of the people). In their search for melodies the chorale writers also turned to vernacular secular songs. The Lied “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” (Innsbruck, | must leave thee), already set in two different polyphonic versions by Heinrich Isaac, was given a sacred text beginning “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen” (O world, 1 must leave thee) Although the chorales were monophonic, composers naturally arranged them in polyphonic settings. Following the tradition of the secular polyphonic Lied, some of these had the chorale melody in the tenor voice, surrounded by other free parts, Alternatively the chorale melody was placed in the topmost voice and the other voices matched it in familiar style. This type is known as cantional setting. Such pieces were suitable for performance by congregation

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and choir, the congregation singing the melody while the choir provided the full polyphonic texture. For trained singers in choirs there were soon settings in motet style, comparable to the Latin motets of the cosmopolitan tradition that continued in the Catholic churches of the time. In sucha chorale motet, the points of imitation were derived from the consecutive phrases of the chorale Each phrase was then treated separately in fuga or familiar style, with a periodie structure just like that of the motet

The Calvinist Reformation

witzerland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland, the Reformation primarily to Jean Calvin for its authority. Unlike Luther, Calvin was not musical. In fact he was suspicious of music, having the same sort of reservations about its popishness that the early Christian fathers had expressed toward the pagan associations of music in their own time. Like the early church leaders, too, Calvin laid greater emphasis on the words of church music than on the music itself, Moreover, Calvin was generally more strongly opposed to the Roman liturgy than Luther, and he aimed to create a worship service more oriented toward preaching than toward prayer, praise, and the Eucharist. Calvin considered banishing music from the worship service altogether, but he ultimately compromised by allowing the congregation to sing monophonic psalms. No polyphonic singing was allowed in church, and nonscriptural songs were banned altogether. Thus the Calvinist Reformation did not produce a body of new hymn texts comparable to the chorales of the Lutherans. Instead, the Huguenots, as Calvin's French followers were commonly known, created rhymed, metrical translations of the biblical psalms into vernacular poetry. These were sung to tunes often adapted from the chant or from secular music Although only unison singing was permitted in public worship, simple polyphonic settings were permissible for private devotional use in Calvinist homes. As the Lutherans had Johann Walter, Calvin's movement found a musical leader in the Frenchman Louis Bourgeois (ca. 1510-1561). Bourgeois set many of the psalm melodies, treating them like the French chansons of the period, syllabically in simple rhythms and in predominantly familiar style Thete were also some more sophisticated, motetlike arrangements The psalms and their music appeared in published form in collections called psalters. The psalters spread this repertoire very widely. The first Calvinist collection was published in 1539 in Strasbourg, and the first complete collection of all 150 psalms appeared in Geneva in 1562. In the meantime an important collection called Souterliedekens (little psalter songs) was released in the Netherlands in 1540. In Germany there were already psalm settings (in-

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137

cluding some monophonic ones by Hans Sachs), and the first complete Lutheran psalter dates from 1553, but the French psalms in translation became much more popular and helped expand the chorale repertoire. As the Calvinist movement spread to the British Isles, psalters appeared in English the collection of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, known simply as “Stemhold and Hopkins” (1562), is a classic of the genre The Calvinist psalters are the forerunners of all modern hymnbooks in America, The Pilgrims brought with them the Ainsworth Psalter (1612, Amsterdam), and the first native American psalter was the famous Bay Psalm Book, published in Massachusetts in 1640. Many of the tunes of the early sixteenth century are still used today; certainly the best known of all must be the tune called “Old Hundredth,” to which almost all American Protestants sing the Lesser Doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

The Reformation in England ‘As has already been mentioned, the Reformation in England was as much political as theological. Henry VIII rejected the political authority of Rome,

including the right of the pope to uphold or annul an English king's marriages, and finally took to himself spiritual as well as secular authority in his realm The religious history of England during the Tudor petiod is one of alternation between Reformation austerity in the Calvinist manner and returns to the Roman church. In 1534 Henry VIII separated the English church from the

Roman, and after his death reform was continued in the name of his young son

Edward VI, who ruled from 1547 to 1553 and died before his sixteenth birth-

day, There followed a return to Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary, who

had strong Catholic ties, since she was the child of Henry's first marriage and

the wife of King Philip II of Spain. She, in turn, died in 1558. Her sister, Elizabeth 1, achieved the final separation of the Anglican from the Roman

church.

The English liturgy was similar to the Roman but was translated and in

some ways reformed. It included only two daily services derived from the Divine Office, Morning Prayer (from Matins) and Evening Prayer (from Ves-

pers). These might be composed musically as either Great Services, if the composer treated the setting in elaborate polyphonic and melismatic style, or Short Services, if the music was simple, syllabic, and in predominantly familiar style. The Holy Communion, which corresponds to the Roman Mass, is less

important for music than the Roman Mass or the Anglican Morning and Eve-

ning Services. In English music a polyphonic setting for performance by the choir is called an anthem (a corruption of antiphon). A full anthem employs a cappella

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choral voices in a through-composed setting with phrase-by-phrase polyphonic treatment of the text, in the same manner as the Latin motet. A verse anthem opposes solo singers accompanied by instruments against the choir. The Counter-Reformation The reformers’ success finally forced the Roman Catholic church to attend to the sad state into which some of its activities had declined. The process of reform from within the Catholic church is known as the Counter-Reformation.

Pope Paul III called the college of cardinals together at Trent (in northern Italy)

to review and reform all aspects of the life of the church. The Council of Trent

lasted eighteen years (1545-1563), and of course music was only one of the

many items on its agenda

The particular musical concerns of the Council of Trent were the same

ones that had worried the early church fathers and the contemporary Protes-

tant reformers. They were disturbed by the complexity of the liturgy, secular

styles and practices that had crept into worship through the centuries, the use

of instruments in the service, and the obscuring of the liturgical words both by careless singers and by composers who neglected words in favor of elaborate music.

One clear action that the council took was to strip the Sequence out of most Mass Propers. Of a total of over four thousand Sequences, they left only four, “Victimae paschali laudes” for Easter, “Veni sancte spiritus” for Pentecost, Lauda Sion” for Corpus Christi, and “Dies irae” for the Requiem Mass.

On the details of musical style there was considerable debate. The most

conservative cardinals seriously wished to forbid all polyphonic music in the church, turning the calendar back eight centuries. Fortunately more musical

heads prevailed. There was no precise legislation of a style, but some general principles emerged: Sensualism, gratuitous elaboration, and virtuosic technique were to be avoided, and, above all, the words were to be made clear. The actual effect of this reconsideration of music and these guidelines was

the espousal, informally at least, of the Franco-Netherlands panconsonant motet style as the particular style of Roman Catholic church music. Ideally the music was to be sung a cappella or with very discreet support from the organ.

There would be no highly expressive dissonance or sensual, dancelike

rhythms, and melodic lines would be singable by nonvirtuoso choristers. Most of all, a syllabic text underlay and familiar-style texture would clarify the

words.

Palestrina The model composer of the music of the Counter-Reformation was Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-1594), who worked at St. Peter's in Rome. He

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139

adopted the Franco-Netherlands technique and worked it into a rich, highly polished language, with minimal dissonance and gently pulsing rhythmic flow that seems to wrap the listener in a blanket of mystical peace. So masterful was Palestrina’s handling of the style that his name later came to be practically synonymous with the ars perfecta of sixteenth-century counterpoint Indeed Palestrina’s reputation was such that he became the subject of a popular legend, According to an often-repeated but unlikely story, Palestrina deserves credit as the savior of polyphonic music in the Catholic church at the Council of Trent, It is said that as the council was debating the fate of polyphony, they heard Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass for Pope Marcellus) The clarity of its text and beauty of its music convinced them that banning polyphony not only was unnecessary but also would eliminate a force of great beauty and power from worship Tomas Luis da Victoria and Roland de Lassus Palestrina represents the conservative side of the music of the Counter-Refor-

mation. There was, however, a more impassioned type of Catholic faith, which guided the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) to found the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, who adopted an aggressive missionary program and took as

their particular responsibility the expansion of human knowledge. Fora musical interpretation of this experience, we can turn to the works of the Spanish composer Tomas Luis da Victoria (ca.

1549-1611).

Victoria studied in Rome

with Palestrina, but his style is much more expressive or madrigalistic than

Palestrina’s. The rhythms are less smooth, for instance, and chromatic and dissonant harmonies highlight the intensity of emotion in the words Another important Catholic composer, Roland de Lassus, or, as he styled

himself in Italian, Orlando di Lasso (ca. 1532-1594), was the last great Netherlands composer to follow the well-worn path to Italy and then north again

He wrote with perfect fluency in the secular styles of his native region and

Italy, and, after serving in Munich, in that of the German Lied. His motets were gathered into a monumental collection under the title Magnum opus musicum

Among his other sacred works are Masses and motet-style settings of the stories of the Passion of Christ from all four Gospels. Lassus's sacred music

seems more aggressive than Palestrina’s; its stronger melodic profiles and greater variety and contrast show perhaps less spirituality but more spirit

Faith, Music, and the Power of Words

Each of the special sets of musical concerns of the different denominations of Christianity that appeared in the sixteenth century inspired a different approach to composition. Though some of the reformers (and counterreformers)

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supported music more enthusiastically than others, the production of important musical ideas and repertoires in each movement demonstrates the power of music as a force in religious experience As in the secular realm, the importance of words to sacred music can hardly be overstressed. Whether they were principally concerned with the intelligibility of words in Latin (the Council of Trent) or in vernacular languages (the northern reformers), with the danger of music as a distraction from the sacred words or as a sensual pleasure (Calvin), or with the attempt to find the right musical style to set the proper tone for the words of worship (Palestrina) or make the specific sense more vivid (Victoria), theologians and composers inevitably found their attentions focused on texts However, the words presented to the composers of sacred music not only problems but also opportunities and inspiration, The English Catholic composer William Byrd (1543-1623), who wrote music for both Roman Catholic and Anglican services, expressed the problems and the joy of sacred words in the dedication to his Gradualia of 1605-1607.

For even as among artisans it is shameful in a craftsman to make a rude piece of work from some precious material, so indeed to sacred words in which the praises of God and of the Heavenly host are sung, none but some celestial harmony (so far as our powers avail) will be proper. Moreover in these words, as | have learned by trial, there is such a profound and hidden power that to one thinking upon things divine and diligently and earnestly pondering them, all the fittest numbers [i.e., tones] occur as if of themselves and freely offer themselves to the mind which is not

indolent or inert.

Questions for Reflection

> How do Luther's and Calvin's theological positions on music in the church echo earlier traditions of thought about music and religion? >

What stylistic aspects of Lutheran church music can be attributed to

German national tastes and traditions in music? What stylistic characteristics

of Lutheran and Calvinist church music account for the survival of numerous

sixteenth-century works into the twentieth century? How can William Byrd's position as composer for the Anglican church be reconciled with the fact that he remained a Roman Catholic?

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Suggestions for Further Reading

An important study of the music of the Lutheran church is Friedrich Blume, Protestant Church Music (New York: Norton, 1974), On English Reformation music, see Peter LeHuray, Music and the Reformation in England, 1549-1660 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) The classic study of the Palestrina style is Knud Jeppesen, The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance, 2d ed., trans. Edward Dent (London: Oxford University Press, 1946) For concise biographical and critical discussions and good bibliographies for Byrd, Lassus, Palestrina, and Victoria, see The New Grove High Renaissance Masters (New York: Norton, 1984), which presents updated versions of the articles from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), Some good individual studies are Paul Nettl, Luther and Music, trans. Frida Best and Ralph Wood (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1948); Jerome Roche, Palestrina (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Jerome Roche, Lassus (London: Oxford University Press, 1982); Edmund H. Fellowes, William Byrd, 2d ed.(London: Oxford University Press, 1948). A comprehensive study of Byrd’s works can be found in the three-volume set The Music of William Byrd: Vol. 1, Joseph Kerman, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Vol. 2, Philip Brett, The Songs, Services and Anthems of William Byrd (in preparation); Vol. 3, Oliver Neighbour, The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London: Faber, 1978)

Notes

1, Oliver Strunk, ed. Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950), 327-328.

ll

THE WANING OF THE RENAISSANCE

Italian Music at the End of the Sixteenth Century

The madrigal continued to be the most important genre for Italian secular music in the late sixteenth century. Palestrina and Lassus each composed many excellent examples. Palestrina’s madrigals resembled his

sacred music in holding toa conservative style. Lassus, who also contrib-

uted to the repertoire of French chansons and German Lieder, excelled

in a wide variety of styles; his madrigals are more lively and colorful in their treatment of the text.

Following the advances made by Rore (discussed in Chapter 8), Luca Marenzio (1553-1599) brought to its peak the use of texts as the inspiration and shaping force for the madrigal, In his works one can

discover a clear textual reason for practically every musical detail. Some of his most effective madrigals set the ardent and sensuous love poems

of his contemporary Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). Marenzio’s work has

been considered the culmination of the madrigal style The theatrical entertainments performed in the Italian courts were important sources of poetry for composition. During the sixteenth cen-

tury these entertainments included plays, often elaborately staged. It

became common in the form of an portrayed ancient with polyphonic

to provide between the acts of plays a brief diversion intermedio (pl. intermedi) or entr'acte. These usually heroic or pastoral stories in pantomime and dance, musical accompaniments and songs. Pastoral plays

with music also became popular as embellishments to grand state occasions, noble weddings, and the like. They were particularly popular and

lavish in the city of Florence. Everywhere they were taken seriously as artistic works; the verses of such important poets as Tasso and Battista Guarini (1538-1612) served as texts for many of the madrigalists.

143

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The increasing sophistication of composers was paralleled by the increasing virtuosity of singers. It was common for singers of polyphonic compositions, like players of instruments, to improvise embellishments or “divisions” in their musical lines. When individual singers performed with lute, keyboard, or a consort of viols, the freedom to demonstrate their vocal ability was even greater. Notable for their vocal feats were several gifted women who sang at the ducal court of Ferrara in the last decades of the sixteenth century; the most famous of these virtuosas were Lucrezia Bendidio (1547-1583), Laura Peverara (ca. 1545-1601), and Tarquinia Molza (1542-1612). The music written

for the Ferrarese women by the court composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi (1545— 1607) shows that they excelled in extremely rapid passagework over impres-

sively wide vocal ranges. Still another aspect of the style of the late Italian Renaissance was the classification of vocal ensemble pieces into various specific categories. Compared to the madrigal, which tended to be compositionally complicated and more serious, the Italians had the canzonetta, which was lighter in mood, likely to be for a smaller group of voices, and simpler to sing. The balletto was a dance song and featured lively, strongly metrical rhythms and a recurring refrain, which often used the nonsense syllables fa la la. A villanella was a popular song, characteristically employing a much less sophisticated type of poetry than the madrigal. It was commonly satirical or amorously suggestive in its content, mocking the madrigal’s lofty intentions. The villanella would be deliberately simple and even crude in technique; familiar-style texture in only three parts was normal, as was the deliberate use of such musical faux pas as parallel fifths for humorous effect.

Late Renaissance Mannerism

As was the case at the close of the Middle Ages, some artists at the end of the Renaissance exaggerated their expressive technique to the point of mannerism, and composers were no exception, In the visual arts, mannerism was manifested to evoke a particularly powerful emotional response through exaggeration and distortion that departed from the earlier Renaissance ideals of moderation and purity of design. These features are particularly noticeable in the works of the painter El Greco (1541-1614),

whose

career is associated

with the deeply spiritual religious inspiration of post-Counter-Reformation Spain, where Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) had their mystical visions. (Fig. 11.1) In literature there was a comparable style in the impassioned amorous sonnets of Tasso, which carry the genre beyond the subtlety and refinement of Petrarch to express strongly sensual attraction and unbridled ardor. (Fig. 11.2) Perhaps the closest English parallel would be the metaphysical and amorous sonnets of John Donne (1573-1631), which are full of extravagant imagery.

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of the Renaissance

145

Figure 11.1 El Greco (1541-1614), Christ on the Cross with Landscape. El Greco's work exemplifies late Renaissance mannerism in painting, The figure is elongated and distorted, conveying the tortured content more effectively than would a purely realistic depiction. (Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund 52.222)

Mannerism in music found its most forceful expression in the highly idiosyncratic madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo

(ca. 1560-1613),

Prince of Venosa

For Gesualdo the actual meanings of the words were less important than the generally wrought up emotional condition of the speaker. He particularly

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Figure 11.2 In this painting, known as either Allegory of Music or simply The Musicians (ca 1594-1595), Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1573~1610) seems to suggest the sensual surfeit of late Renaissance expression. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1952. [52.81))

seized on the expressive potential of chromatic harmony, and he selected highly passionate (though not always poetically polished) texts to give himself the opportunity to explore the most striking melodies and harmonic progressions, Gesualdo’s works often use chromatic vocal lines that are difficult if not impossible to explain within the old syntax of the modes, and they abound in unusual successions of harmonies, especially those that create cross-relations between the parts. The madrigals of Gesualdo pressed the rules of composition as laid down in Zarlino’s Le istitutioni harmoniche to their limits, Nevertheless, Gesualdo did not explicitly abandon the principle of cautious handling of dissonance The Italian Style in England

After its long period of isolation from the developments of Renaissance style on the continent, England was suddenly brought up to date by the 1588 publication by Nicholas Yonge (d. 1619) of a collection of translated Italian

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147

madrigals entitled Musica transalpina. The English composers took up the Italian genre with alacrity. They were abetted in this by the simultaneous flowering of Tudor poetry, for this was, of course, the era that produced Shakespeare. Books of madrigals, as well as the other Italian types of music adapted into English as canzonets and balletts, came out through the remainder of the Elizabethan period and even for several years thereafter. An important anthology of contributions by twenty-four madrigalists, The Triumphs of Oriana (1601), was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, which shows how highly esteemed this type of composition had become. Each of the texts includes a passage in praise of Oriana (a pseudonym for Elizabeth) A particular expressive mannerism in English polyphony of this period is the simultaneous cross-relation. To express intense feeling the English composers characteristically called for the sounding ofa pitch in its natural and its sharped or flatted form. The result is the bizarre clash of an augmented or diminished unison or octave. This procedure stretches the rules of consonant counterpoint, of course. It is explained from a theoretical point of view by the observation that in these cases the higher version of the pitch is presented in a line that leads upward, while the lower version proceeds downward. Thus the momentarily grating sonority is justified by the strongly directed linear motion.

France

At the end of the Renaissance the French produced a mannered approach to the direct treatment of poetic syllables in music that we have already noted in

their secular chansons and in the Calvinist psalm settings. The principal expo-

nent of this was the poet Jean-Antoine Baif (1532-1589), who established the

Academy of Poetry and Music in 1570. Baif attempted to apply ancient Greek

and Latin meters to the French language to create a vers mesurée, a somewhat artificial plan that produces a rather stilted result quite unlike the natural

French language. The task of setting this verse to music fell to the composers

of the academy, among whom was the talented Claude LeJeune (1528-1600).

The strict application of Baif’s principles, making long syllables twice as long as short ones, produced a musique mesurée in which all the voices moved together in homorhythmic fashion. This could, of course, have been deadly

dull, but because the syllable lengths do not predictably add up to consistent musical groupings, the effect is of freely changing meter, and some of the

settings achieve a graceful elegance.

The creation of academies to exert rational control over different fields of

endeavor became a characteristically French tendency. We shall observe this again in the seventeenth century.

A uniquely French genre was the vaudeville (from voix de ville, meaning “town voice”) or city song. The vaudeville was a kind of simple, strophic song,

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performed either by vocal ensemble or, perhaps more commonly, by solo singer and lute. (The sixteenth-century vaudeville has none of the connotations the word carries in the tradition of American popular theater entertainment.) Vaudevilles were commonly used for dancing.

The vaudeville was superseded by the more sophisticated air de cour (court song), which first appeared in 1571 and continued into the seventeenth century. The airs de cour were often based on the musique mesurée approach to rhythm, The scoring called for solo voice with lute

The Venetian Style

Before leaving the Renaissance, we must take note of a special development associated particularly with the city of Venice. In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Venice developed into one of the most important commercial cities in Europe. As the northeastern port of Italy, it was a major point on land and sea trade routes between Europe and the East. An oligarchy, Venice was governed not by individual noblemen, but by a council made up of members of the wealthy merchant class. The city rapidly became both extremely rich and, compared to other Italian cities, secure. In contrast to the practice in other cities, the arts were more a civic privilege than a tool for the self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement of the nobility.

One of the great musical centers of Europe in the sixteenth century was Venice's basilica of St. Mark. We have already met some of its celebrated

maestri di cappella, Willaert, Rore, and Zarlino. The basilica has several galleries, in which were placed separate organs; it became the focus for the development of a special type of scoring that used multiple choirs antiphonaily to create a stereophonic effect. (Fig. 11.3) This polychoral technique, sometimes

called cori spezzati (“spaced-out choirs”), was not entirely new, of course, since it followed the venerable practice of antiphonal singing in the church; nor was

it necessarily limited to St. Mark's. It gained popularity, however, from its use by Willaert, who also applied it in the secular reaim in some of his madrigals By the end of the century the polychoral style had become well established

St. Mark's organists Andrea Gabrieli (ca. 1510-1586) and his even more

talented nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1553-1612) mastered the polychoral technique. They generally used broad, simple rhythmic gestures and a good

deal of familiar style scoring to support and clarify the musical dialogue. The separate choirs join at some moments, particularly at the conclusion ofa piece,

to give a massive dynamic climax. Giovanni Gabrieli carried the polychoral design into his 1597 canzonalike, eight-part instrumental piece headed “So-

nata pian e forte,” which is also notable for having the first occurrence of

specific indications of dynamic contrasts throughout a musical work. (The term sonata here, by the way, is not yet established as the designation of a

The Wani

Figure 11.3 The basilica of St. Mark in Venice, begun in 1063, was the site of important experiments in polychoral composition in the sixteenth century, The galleries had space for two different organs and different vocal or instrumental ensembles. (Alinari/Art Resource)

particular genre; Gabrieli probably thought of the work as a canzona and simply meant the heading literally: “played soft and loud.” The forte and piano indications refer to passages where both four-part choirs play together (forte) or either choir plays alone (piano). This work also pioneered in the scoring of specific instruments, calling for one ensemble made up of a cornetto and three sackbuts and another including a violino and three sackbuts The Significance of Late Renaissance Styles

The development of a wide variety of national, local, and individual styles in the late sixteenth century may be regarded as evidence that the principles and techniques of the Renaissance had reached a point of crisis. The ideal of a highly polished musical lingua franca that had permitted the cosmopolitan style in music to be lauded as “ars perfecta” had given way to the experiments

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and exploitations of particular aspects of the style by individual composers or schools of composers. They had inherited an elegant and refined cosmopolitan language. Though their ideas were extremely imaginative and their composition skillful, they certainly left Renaissance music in a riot of idiosyncratic interpretations As we begin to examine the music of the seventeenth century, though, we shall discover that the new approaches of these composers comprised the seeds of an altogether new style. The Italian madrigalists’ desire fora greater intensity in musical expression, the French academics’ insistence on clarity through simple texture and strictly text-based rhythm, and the Venetian abandonment of the ideal of homogeneous sound in favor of contrasts in scoring and dynamics, were harbingers of essential elements of a new musical language

Questions for Reflection

How did nonmusical events in history contribute to the formation of late-Renaissance musical styles? What purely musical forces shaped the development of those styles? What aspects of the national character of Italy and France are embodied in the particular musical styles developed in each of those countries in the late Renaissance? Would it be justifiable to regard the history of musical style in the Renaissance as having roots, main stem, and branches, like a plant? Why or why not? Suggestions for Further Reading

The end of the Renaissance is discussed in the general studies listed in the Suggested Readings for Chapter 7. For the late madrigal, see also the Suggested Readings for Chapter 8. Two sources focussing on the English madrigal are Edmund H, Fellowes, The English Madrigal Composers, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), and Joseph Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal (New York: American Musicological Society, 1962) Biographies of individual composers include Denis Arnold, Marenzio (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Glenn Watkins, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); Egon Kenton, The Life and Works of Giovanni Gabrieli (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1967); Denis Arnold, Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1979)

THE ARRIVAL OF THE BAROQUE

Rationalism

The humanistic direction of the Renaissance led to the movement in philosophy known as rationalism. To the philosophers of the seventeenth century it was essential that reason supersede received authority not only from the church but also from antiquity or any other source Francis Bacon (1561-1626) articulated the rationalist philosophical premise in 1620:

Man, the administrator and the interpreter of nature, does and understands only as much as he has observed, in reality or the mind of nature’s order: he neither understands nor can do any more René Descartes (1596-1650) systematically pursued the rigorous application of reason in the service of philosophical understanding in his Discourse on Method of 1637.

In his Meditations (1641) Descartes forced

himself to abandon the authority of the church and scripture and of

earlier philosophy, and even the evidence of his own senses—every presupposition except reason itself. Beginning with the only verifiable

truth he could think of, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I exist) he

reconstructed the world.

A different sort of rationalism, rooted in the premise that only mate-

rial things are real, led the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to

develop a political philosophy that viewed social organization as a means of mutual protection against the purely selfish instincts of human individuals. Hobbes concluded that a strong absolutist monarchy was

justified not by the divine right of kings but because it was the most effective means to assure social stability

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Chapter 12 It would be an exaggeration to think that rationalism constituted the sole

philosophical viewpoint of the seventeenth century. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) offered a view of the human condition that argued for faith, not reason, attempted to synth

as the way of fulfillment. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) reason and empiricism, human intellect and human

will, and Nature and God.

Aesthetic Considerations The musical period from about 1600 to about 1750 has come to be known as

the Baroque era. This is a somewhat unfortunate name. The term, borrowed for music [rom art history, was originally applied to the arts with a derogatory implication: It means overly ornamented, distorted, bizarre, eccentric, or even grotesque. Like the term Gothic used for the period beginning in about 1150, it is based on the viewpoint of a later generation that had different aesthetic values. There

certainly is a strain of exaggeration and lavish ornamentation in

some Baroque art, literature, and music, We find such characteristics, for example, in some of the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), with

their women voluptuous to the point of fatness, surrounded by chubby cherubs or cupids. (Plate 5) The expansive richness of some of the verbal pictures in John Milton’s (1608-1674) Paradise Lost (1667) leave a similarly ornate

impression, as in this description of the angel choirs of heaven all The multitude of Angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heavin rung With Jubilee, and loud Hosanna’ filld Th’eternal Regions: lowly reverent Towards either Throne they bow, and to the ground With solemn adoration down they cast Thir Crowns inwove with Amarant and Gold, Immortal Amarant, a Flowr which once In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life Began to bloom, but soon for mans offence To Heav'n remov'd where first it grew, there grows And flowrs aloft shading the Fount of Life, And where the river of Bliss through midst of Heavn Rowls o're Elisian Flowers her Amber stream; With these that never fade the Spirits Elect Bind thir resplendent locks inwreath'd with beams, Now in loose Garlands thick thrown off, the bright Pavement that like a Sea of Jasper shon

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Impurpl'd with Celestial Roses smil’d Then Crown’d again thir golden Harps they took Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by thir side Like Quivers hung, and with Praeamble sweet Of charming symphonie they introduce This sacred Song, and waken raptures high: No voice exempt, no voice but well could join Melodious part, such concord is in Heaven (Book UL, lines 344-371)!

Perhaps the most extravagant of all the arts in the Baroque period was interior

design, which featured sculpture and painting that crowded walls and columns with a riot of figures. Often these figures hardly seem able to stay in their places but are so crowded that they emerge into the room and intrude into the viewer's space. The artists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries would not

have identified these “baroque” qualities as their aesthetic purpose, however.

Indeed, it would be a gross misrepresentation to characterize all the art of the

time as sharing these traits. The quiet domestic scenes painted by Jan Vermeer

(1632-1675) and the intense visions of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) are

quite different from the works of Rubens.

The styles of the French comedic

dramatist Moligre (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673) and tragedians Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699) could hardly be

said to resemble that of Milton in any way. Like artists ofall times, those of this period thought of themselves as “modern.” They must have seen more variety

among their styles than later historians, whose purpose is to impose some order on this century and a half

If required to identify a particular way in which their aesthetic intention

had turned away from that of the High Renaissance, the artists of the so-called

Baroque era probably would have stressed the understanding of how the work

was to affect the observer, reader, or audience.

Unlike the artists of the fil-

teenth and early sixteenth centuries, they intended not simply to depict or imitate (Aristotelian mimesis) reality in an aesthetically satisfying manner, but

to impose a particular state of mind on the audience. The quality of the work

of art depended on how strongly it affected the observer or listener. To sense

the importance of this, one need only view Gianlorenzo Bernini's sculpture of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa of Avila for the Cornaro Chapel. The figure is totally abandoned to the moment of religious transport, (Fig. 12.1) The Doctrine of Affections

In the seventeenth-century view of human experience states of mind were known as affections, passions, or humors. The rationalist Descartes explored these affections in his 1649 treatise The Passions of the Soul. The affections are

Figure 12.1 The hallmark of Baroque artistic expression is consuming passion, as in the sculpture St. Teresa in Eestasy for the Cornaro Chapel (1645—1652) by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). St. Teresa abandons herself to passion as an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of divine love. The surrounding decoration displays the Baroque love of ornament.

(Alinari/Art Resource)

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quite static, not much like the fluctuating feelings we now call emotions. (Fig 12.2) There are six basic affections:

love, hate,

joy, sorrow, wonder,

and

desire; any others must be compounded from these Descartes gave a physiological explanation for the affections that seems rather quaint today, based as it is on the application of rational argument in total disregard for any scientific study of anatomy. In his theory Descartes said the affections depended on bodily fluids known as humors (hence the use of

this term as a synonym for affections), which controlled one’s state of mind

according to whether they were watery or thick and whether they rose to the

head or flowed downward. Particularly important for aesthetics was the belief

that the consistency of the humors, and consequently the passions, could be altered by external stimuli. Thus a work of art ought to provide a stimulus that would change the humors to produce the intended affection; a painting, a poem, or a piece of music should make the viewer, reader, or listener feel joy, for example, not merely depict a joyful occasion or figure

This doctrine of the affections clearly has something in common with the

Greek doctrine of ethos. They are not the same thing, however, any more than

the doctrine of the affections is identical to the Renaissance idea of mimesis or

to the understanding of emotional expression in the nineteenth century. The

doctrine of ethos insists that through the work the artist changes the character of the audience, while the doctrine of the affections somewhat more modestly

grants the artist power only over the audience's present state of mind Generally then, when we refer to the period of music history from 1600 to 1750 as Baroque, we should do so without intending to criticize the music

as gaudy or overly ornamental. Baroque has become merely the conventional

term for all the music of that era, much of which is not particularly “baroque”

atall. If we wish to think of the music according to its place in general cultural history, we might refer to it as the music of the period of rationalism. If we wish to use a general term to capture the aesthetic views of the period, we might call it the period of affective expression. In any case, it is important to

keep in mind that the Baroque era lasted for a long time and, like other periods, actually includes a wide variety of different styles, some that thrived simultaneously and others that arose by historical evolution

The Florentine Camerata

In the 1570s in Florence there was a group of intellectuals, including some musicians, who met in the home of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534—1612) to discuss the art and philosophy of the ancients and their application to contemporary culture. They are known as the camerata (from the Italian word camera, “a room,” since they met in a private room rather than a public place; the

Figure 12.2

Baroque opers

ession of the aflections than true drat 1. The characters in this scene from a Baroque opera performance painted by Pietro Domenico Olivero express simple was more a

matter of rhetorical ex

by standard rhetorical gestures:

sternness; the young

the young girl, sorrow;

the father,

man, humble petition, (MuseoCivico di Torino

haughr

English cognate is, of course, comrades). Among these men was Vinc Galilei (late 1520-1591), a lutenist and singer (and, incidentally, the father of the great scientist Galileo Galilei), who, in a treatise entitled Dialogo della musica antica ¢ della moderna (Dialogue on ancient and modern music, 1581) presented a critique of the sixteenth-century polyphonic technique, based on aesthetic grounds developed from the theories of the Greeks. He objected to

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polyphonic text settings because he felt that they created confusion rather than clarity in interpreting the affections (he commonly uses the phrase concetti dell’anima, or “conceptions of the soul”) that the words intended to express He

wrote,

if the practice of music . . . was introduced to mankind for the purpose and aim that all the wise alike agree in saying—which is that it originated,

firstly, for no other reason than to express with greater effectiveness the

conceptions of their soul in celebrating the praises of the gods, of the genii, and of the heroes, . . and, secondly, to impress them with equal force into the minds of mortals for their profit and comfort—then it will be clear that the rules observed by the modern contrapuntists as inviolable

laws, as well as those others that they so frequently use by choice and to

demonstrate their know-how, will all be directly opposed to the perfec-

tion of the best and true harmonies and melodies. the nature of the low sound is one thing, that of the high another, and that of the intermediate is different from the one and the other of

these. Similarly . . . fast motion has one property, slow another, and mod-

erate

is far from the one and from the other of these, Now, these two

principles being true, which they certainly are, it can easily be concluded from them .. . that singing in consonance in the manner that the modern

practitioners use is inappropriate. For consonance is nothing other than a mixture of high and low sound, which (as you have already understood) strikes the sense of hearing inoffensively, or delightfully, or most sweetly.

Galilei continued by arguing that while the polyphonic style may sound very elegant, it does not genuinely convey the passions to the hearer There is nobody who does not regard the variety of these {ie., Zarlino’s}

observances as excellent and necessary means to the simple delight that the sense of hearing takes in the variety of harmonies. But for the expression of conceptions they are pernicious, for they are useful for nothing except to make the ensemble varied and full, and this is not always, indeed is never, suited to the expression of any conception of the poet or orator. . . Consider each rule of the modern contrapuntists in its own right, or, if you wish, all of them together. They intend nothing but the

delight of the sense of hearing—if it is possible to call that true delight

There is no book at hand for them that speaks, nor that thinks or ever

thought, of such an invention as the means by which to express the

conceptions of the soul and to impress them with the greatest possible effect on the minds of the hearers;

He further ridiculed the mimetic manner of dealing with poetic texts: Lastly I come, as | promised, to the treatment of the most important and principal part of music, and this is the imitation of the conceptions that

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are drawn from the words. . . . Our practical contrapuntists say, then, or

hold to be certain, that they have expressed the conceptions of the soul in

suitable fashion and have imitated the words whenever,

in setting to

music a sonnet, a canzone, a romanzo, a madrigal, or any other text in which there is founda line that says, for example, “Bitter and savage heart,

and cruel desire,”

which is the first line of one of Petrarch’s sonnets, they

have made many sevenths, fourths, seconds, and major sixths among the parts when they are sung, and created by means of these a rough, harsh,

and graceless sound in the ears of the hearers. . . . Atother times they will say they are imitating the words when among the conceptions of these there are any meaning “to flee” or “to fly,” which they will declaim with as much speed and with as little grace as anyone can imagine. And in texts that have said “to disappear,” “to be reduced,” “to die,” or actually “exhausted,” they have made the parts break off instantaneously with such

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violence, that instead of inducing any of these affections, they have moved

the listeners to laughter, and at other times to contempt. . .

When they

have said “alone,” “two,” or “together,” they have made a solo, two, or all

together sing with unusual elegance Finally, Galilei offered his own principles for musical expression:

Then they wonder that the music of their time does not create any of the notable effects that ancient music created; where, on the contrary, the

former is so far from the latter and so deformed—indeed its opposite and its mortal enemy, as has been demonstrated and will be demonstrated even more. They would, rather, have more to be amazed about if it did

create any [such effects], since it possesses no means to enable it to think

of them, much less achieve them, its purpose being nothing other than the delight of the sense of hearing, and that of the other kind [ancient music]

being the production in another person . . . of the same affection as in one’s self.

if they want to understand the way [to express the affections in mu-

sic], | am happy to show them where and from whom they can learn, without much effort or nuisance—indeed, with the greatest enjoyment— and here it is. When for their amusement they go to the tragedies and

comedies that the buffoons act, they should sometimes give up their unrestrained laughter, and instead be so gracious as to observe in what manner one peaceful gentleman speaks with another—with what kind of

voice as regards highness and lowness, what sort of accents and gestures, how and slowness of motion. They should ence that occurs among all these cases:

with what volume of sound, with he declaims with regard to speed pay a little attention to the differwhen one of them speaks to one

of his servants, or one of these with another; they should consider what happens when a prince is discoursing with one of his subjects or vassals,

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when with a supplicant who is making an entreaty; how an enraged man speaks, or an excited man; how the married woman; how the young girl; how the simple child; how the clever prostitute; how the man in love when he talks to his beloved in order to get her to give in to his wishes how those who lament; how those who shout; how the timid man; and how those who exult with happiness. What Galilei proposes, therefore, is that in order to express the affections of

the speaker, the music should imitate not the poetic images themselves but the manner in which an actor spoke in assuming a particular role and creating a particular affection. This approach led to a new Baroque aesthetic for music,

following the model of oratory rather than that of poetry. The new composers

adapted to their musical compositions the principles they found in the already well-developed and familiar study of rhetoric. They discussed musical forms

as if they paralleled the sections of a public speech, and they classified musical gestures as “figures” in the same fashion that one would list the figures of speech (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and so on) From his correspondence with the Roman scholar Girolamo Mei (1519-

1594), Galilei learned that the music of the ancient Greeks was not polyphony but monody (from the prefix mono-, plus the root aedien, meaning “to sing”)

This fit in well with Galilei’s own reservations about the conflicting melodic

gestures among the voices in a polyphonic composition. Moreover, he already had experience with the Renaissance lute song. He proposed that the new music should consist of a single vocal melody line with accompaniment by lute or keyboard instrument, a compromise between returning to bare mo-

nophony and the confusing complexities of counterpoint. Thus, out of an

aesthetic theory came the justification for the idea of homophonic texture.

Monody and the Basso Continuo

By the time Galilei wrote his treatise, there were several models in the polyphonic repertoire that already approached the homophonic conception. The

traditions of solo singing included the polyphonic cantilena-style settings of

fourteenth- and fifteenth-century songs, and the practice of singing frottole to

familiar style accompaniment played on the lute or other instruments,

Of

course in the flexible performance practice of the time practically any poly-

phonic piece could be taken up by one voice and instruments, whether or not

that was the original intention The solo song tradition with which Galilei was most directly acquainted

was that of the Italian Renaissance aria, a simple formulaic setting for voice

and lute (or similar accompaniment) in familiar style that was used to sing

poetic texts in a variety of standard forms. Since Italian poetry employed lines

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of conventional lengths, mostly seven or eleven syllables, the melodies of these arias could be repeated for stanzaic poems in strophic fashion. They might also be transferred from text to text, for they did not attempt to interpret word meanings, The aria formulas generally hada simple harmonic style, sometimes no more than an alternation among a few 3 harmonies, and clear, declamatory rhythmic character. Singers and players would have improvised variations in the repetitions of the phrases according to their taste and skill Galilei himself wrote some arias, but he was not a very distinguished artist. The composer who most deserves credit for putting the camerata’s ideas into practice in the solo song is Giulio Caceini (ca. 1550-1618), whose collection Le nuove musiche (New music, published in 1602) demonstrates the full potential of monodic song. Caccini’s preface to Le nuove musiche makes clear that his aim was what Galilei had espoused, “to move the affect of the soul,” He expressed concern with the accurate performance of his songs and thus left us a document that explains some of the omamental figures of early Baroque performance practice: free melismatic passaggi; the accento, a run up toa note from a third below; a dynamic shaping of a single sustained note that he calls esclamatione; the trillo, at that time a rapid reiteration of a pitch; and the gruppo, which is equivalent to the later trill on two adjacent notes (Ex. 12.1). Example 12.1 Vocal ornaments of the early Baroque, from Caccini’s Le nuove musiche. Trillo

Ribartuta di gola Cascata

The songs of Le nuove musiche are of two sorts. There are several strophic arias, continuing the tradition of the sixteenth-century genre. There are also madrigals in monodic style. The madrigals owe to the polyphonic Italian madrigal a free form derived from the divisions of the text. Of course these through-composed songs are more likely than the arias to interpret the words; they are also more inclined to apply a florid, virtuosic style that is impossible when the same music has to suit a number of different verses equally well.

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The most important new aspect of these monodic madrigals and arias is the nature of their accompaniment. Caccini took pains to explain the somewhat new notation he used for the keyboard (or possibly lute) accompantment. He gives only a bass line, with numbers to indicate to the player what intervals above those notes are to be filled in to flesh out the supporting part This practice, which dominated music throughout the entire Baroque period and continued into the nineteenth century, is known as basso continuo ot thoroughbass. (It is so pervasive that the great German music historian Hugo Riemann was inclined to label the period the “basso continuo era.”) This approach to writing accompaniments was not a new invention of Caccini’s. It evolved from a shorthand of Renaissance church organists who often assisted choirs by playing along with the lowest line of the vocal parts, doubling the bass when it was present, the tenor when the bass dropped out, and so on. This was called basso seguente (following bass), To be still more helpful, the organist might supply other details, such as the top line, the entrances of points of imitation, or important notes of the harmony. The numbers were added to bass lines beginning in the 1590s, though they remained optional, so a basso continuo part might be either figured or unfigured The basso continuo part might be played on a single instrument that could perform chords, such as a harpsichord or organ ora lute or theorbo. To highlight the bass line, however, it was more effective to double that part on a linear bass instrument. In the early part of the Baroque period the viola da gamba and violone were probably the most common companions for the keyboard or lute in continuo bass playing, By the end of the period the cello had generally supplanted the viol, Wind instruments such as bassoons or trombones could also play continuo parts The basso continuo represents a significant step in a new direction, It produced a polarized musical texture between melody and bass lines with independent functions, The bass line provided a harmonic foundation and consequently gave up some of the melodic flow that it had shared with the other parts in polyphonic music. Meanwhile, the top voice melody became freer to undertake rhetorical expressive figures and virtuosic ornamental gestures.

Concertato

Essential to the style of Baroque music is a new sound ideal. In opposition to the (at least theoretical) model of the homogeneous sound of an a cappella vocal ensemble that dominated the Renaissance, Baroque composers favored a scoring that featured contrasting timbres. The term commonly applied to this sort of scoring is concertato, or, in English, concerted.

The use of the term apparently began as a way of indicating that a vocal piece was doubled in performance by instruments; a motet or madrigal might

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be “concertato” with organ or viols. As we noted earlier, the exploitation of

contrast in scoring was a particular hallmark of the Venetian composers of the late sixteenth century, It is not surprising, therefore, to find the first appearance of pieces actually called concertos in Giovanni Gabrieli’s 1587 publication of some polychoral settings for multiple choirs and instruments by his uncle Andrea. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term concer-

tato implies any use of contrasting voices or instruments with separate func-

tions, from solo songs with keyboard continuo accompaniment to large, mul-

timovement instrumental works with one or more soloists and orchestral ensemble

Seconda Prattica

One of the very important factors in the break between the Renaissance and Baroque musical styles was their different approaches to dissonance. It will be remembered that the ideal in the Renaissance was the panconsonant treatment of harmony codified in 1558 by Gioseffe Zarlino in his Istitutioni harmoniche.

Zarlino prescribed a very cautious handling of dissonant tones, limiting them to unaccented passing tones and suspensions. The late sixteenth-century mannerists had carried the style to its limit by exploiting chromaticism but had not

explicitly abandoned the principles of the panconsonant harmonic language At the turn of the century, however, the very premises of the style were challenged

In 1600 the theorist G.M. Artusi (ca. 1540-1613) published a very strong

attack on some recent madrigals by the rising composer Claudio Monteverdi

(1567~1643). In his essay, subtitled Delle imperfeztoni della moderna musica

(On the imperfections of modern music), Artusi provided score examples that showed several different passages from Monteverdi's music in which various striking and (according to the rules of Renaissance counterpoint formulated by Zarlino) totally impermissible dissonances occurred, including accented passing tones and neighboring tones as well as the unprepared dissonances, appoggiaturas and escaped tones. Monteverdi, at the time maestro di cappella to the Duke of Mantua, responded briefly to Artusi five years later in the foreword to his Fifth Book of Madrigals. He wrote simply,

Do not be surprised that I am giving these madrigals to the press without first responding to the attacks that Artusi has made against a few minor details of them; for, being in the service of His Most Serene Highness of Mantua, I am not master of that time which such a thing would require of me. | have, nevertheless, written the reply to make it known that I do not create my things by chance, and as soon as it is rewritten it

The Arrival of the Baroque

163

will emerge into the light, bearing on the front the title Seconda Pratica, 0 Perfezioni della Moderna Musica [Second practice, or perfections of moder music]. At this, perhaps, some will be astonished, not believing that there is another practice besides that taught by Zarlino; but they may be sure that, as far as the consonances and dissonances are concerned, there is also another consideration, different from the established one, which, to the satisfaction of both reason and sense, justifies modern composing And this I have wished to say so that this term “second practice” in the meantime may not be taken over by anyone else, and also so that the ingenious may in the meantime consider other, secondary things having to do with harmony, and believe that the modern composer builds on the foundations of truth He never published the promised reply, but his defense was amplified by his brother Giulio Cesare Monteverdi in 1607 as an appendix toa set of Claudio’s pieces called Scherzi musicali. This essay explains that dissonances forbidden by the older style—prima prattica (first practice) or stile antico (old style)—are justified in the new music by the affections suggested by the words. This principle is defended on the basis of the ancient Greek authors, who included words as an integral component of music, and by appealing to the precedent of the expressive madrigals of Rore, Marenzio, Gesualdo, and others. Artusi had, of course, omitted the words from the examples he had published (though he actually did anticipate this defense) Thus this new harmonic style, to be called seconda prattica or stile moderno, operates on the fundamental premise that the text or expressive intention controls the details of the music, It can be perceived wherever the harmonic syntax of the former style is disrupted. Consequently a decisive difference between Renaissance and Baroque music is the treatment of harmony. Not surprisingly, in view of the emphasis on rhetoric as the model for expression, applications of nonharmonic tones in music were explained as “figures” of musical discourse

Expression of New Ideas in New Styles

As was suggested earlier, the rupture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was much greater than that between the Renaissance and the Baroque The close relation between literary and musical art is common to both. What

changed was the manner in which this relationship was understood and employed in music. The change from the Renaissance to the Baroque reflects first of all a

change in aesthetic thought.

Instead of attempting to reflect poetic sound,

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Chapter 12

structure, and imagery in music, Baroque composers sought to induce certain powerful affections in their listeners. The understanding of the manner in which this was to be achieved changed from a poetic, mimetic model to a thetorical one The sound of the music was affected in several ways. The homophonic texture of an expressive solo line and basso continuo accompaniment replaced the polyphonic style. The concertato sound ideal of timbral contrast rather than homogeneity dominated the new music. The panconsonant sonority of Renaissance music was superseded by the seconda prattica’s free use of dissonance to increase the affective force of the composition

Questions for Reflection

How does the change from Renaissance to Baroque in the history of musical style compare to the change from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance? @ How are the rational and passionate components of music experience kept in balance or synthesized in Baroque artistic and musical thought and style? * How does the basso continuo texture relate to earlier textures in the history of music?

Suggestions for Further Reading

An excellent overview of the Baroque period in music history can be found in Friedrich Blume, Renaissance and Baroque Music (New York: Norton, 1967) ‘Two fine surveys are Manfred F, Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (New York Norton, 1947), now somewhat dated, and Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). Detail on the Florentine camerata may be pursued in Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven Yale University Press, 1989), The preface to Caccini’s Le nuove musiche is available in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950), and in the excellent edition of Le nuove musiche by H. Wiley Hitchcock (Madison, Wis.:

A~R,

1970).

Giulio Cesare Monteverdi's amplification of Claudio Monteverdi's seconda prattica is included in Strunk, Source Readings in Music History. Biographies of Claudio Monteverdi are Leo Schrade, Monteverdi, Creator of Modern Music

The Arrival of the Baroque

165

(New York: Norton, 1964); Denis Arnold, Monteverdi, rev. ed. (London: Dent, 1975).

Notes

1. John Milton, The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shaweross (New York: Anchor, 1971), 307.

THE EARLY BAROQUE

Three Styles In

1649

the Italian musical

scholar Marco

Scacchi

(ca.

1600-1697)

wrote ina letter to a German composer a list of musical styles that were current in the first half century of the Baroque period, He subsumed all the different types of vocal music under three general headings: stylus ecclesiasticus (church style), stylus cubicularis (chamber style), and stylus theatralis (theatrical style). Each had its own place, and each possessed its own compositional characteristics. Naturally the church style was the most conservative of the three and the theatrical style the most progressive. A good deal of variety was possible within each classification, however, and cross-fertilization among the styles was recognized. In the present chapter we shall consider the music of this period under Scacchi’s headings, though not in the same order in which he treated them. The Creation of Opera In earlier eras of music history, music had been combined with drama in the service of religion—in the ancient Greek dramas, for example, and

in medieval liturgical drama. The more these dramatic types became

independent of religious connections, however, the more they focussed on action and speech rather than music During the Renaissance composers had written madrigal dialogues in the form of conversations between characters; for example, the poet may

speak to his own heart or to the god of love (Amor, Cupid). Sometimes

the distinction between the interlocutors was reflected by a division of

the singers into two groups. There were also madrigal comedies, series of polyphonic ensemble songs that traced a brief comic story

167

168

Chapte

cal dramas naturally unfolded solely in the imagiisteners, for an ensemble of singers cannot, of role. Such a drama is closer toa radio sensibly act outa single speaker's course, play than to a staged production in a theater. Orazio Vecchi's L’Amfiparnaso with woodcut illus(1597), the most famous madrigal comedy. was published trations to help the singers visualize the action In addition, the intermedi and pastoral dramas provided texts for many madrigalists. These productions set the stage. so to speak, for the early develThe action in-such mu: nations of the singers al

opment of opera

The Florentine camerata, with its intense interest in the art of ancient Greece, predictably gave much attention to the Greek drama. From Rome, Girolamo Met informed the Florentines that he believed that the Greeks had sung their dramas throughout. Now the achievement of the monodic texture provided a practical solution to the problem of singing actors. Taking their subject matter from the Greek stories that were already commonly used in the pastorals, the Florentine composers experimented with a new type of musical drama, sung and acted throughout, and created the opera First Experiments in Opera

The first opera was a production entitled Dafne, which was created in 1594 and staged in 1598. The libretto was written by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562-1621), and the music was primarily the work of the composer and

singer Jacopo Peri (1561-1633). Unfortunately only fragments of Dafne have survived.

In 1600, however, on the occasion of the wedding of Maria de’

Medici of Florence to Henry IV of France (an extravagant occasion, also com-

memorated in paintings by Rubens), Peri and Rinuccini teamed up again and

created the first genuine opera that survives intact, Euridice. Appropriately, it

recounts the story of Orpheus, the great singer of Greek myth, and how through the power of his music he attempted to recover his dead wife Euridice from Hades. Peri probably sang Orpheus's role himself. (Caccini, one of the

more competitive personalities in music history, soon joined the operatic

movement. He managed to force a few numbers of his own composition into Peri’s Euridice and also brought out a complete setting of the same libretto.)

It is fortunate for music history that Peri wrote about his composition in

a foreword to the opera when it was published the next year. He explained there that in Dafne and Euridice he had abandoned the former lyrical style of singing and adopted a more speechlike style. This new declamatory style, which Caccini called stile rappresentativo, is now generally called recitative. Peri identified its rhythms as falling between those of natural speech and those of singing. In examining the music, we find that the melodic inflections are similarly guided by considerations of affective speech more than by meaning. The texture is, of course, basso continuo homophony.

The Early Baroque

169

One of the most striking features of Peri's music, to which he devoted considerable attention in his foreword, is the way in which he used harmony The bass line was given the responsibility for underscoring the stresses in the text, which it accomplishes by the timing of harmonic changes. The harmonies between the vocal line and the bass are often freely dissonant, which creates a sense of forward motion through the phrase between one stressed, consonant harmony and the next. Thus Peri achieved a type of seconda prattica based not directly on emotional tensions but on the nature of speech itself Emilio de’ Cavalieri (ca,

1550-1602),

the director who staged the first

performance of Peri’s Euridice, can also claim some of the credit for the early development of opera. His sacred, somewhat idealized drama Rappresentatione di anima e di corpo (Representation of the soul and the body) was produced in Rome in 1600. It might be regarded as the first opera, since its libretto was actually set to music throughout, but its allegorical nature diminishes its dramatic character. Its score deserves recognition as the first printed score with figured bass. Cavalieri also claimed for himself the invention of the stile rappresentativo; his dialogue does not show the true recitative style, however, but is relatively lyrical and measured in its rhythm. Cavalieri also did not explore the advanced harmonic possibilities of the seconda prattica for affective expression

Orfeo The first true masterpiece of opera was Monteverdi’s Orfeo, composed in Mantua in 1607. In this his first opera, the composer demonstrated that he could be as skillful and imaginative in an extended dramatic work as he could be

expressive and experimental in the madrigal. He and his librettist Alessandro Striggio (ca. 1573-1630) adopted the same Greek story that Peri had used in Euridice, but Monteverdi achieved a more effective reconciliation of the dra-

matic usage of the recitative style with the need for purely musical interest. As a matter of fact, much of the design of Monteverdi's Orfeo seems to have been modeled on Peri’s opera. Monteverdi expanded the plan, however, in both breadth and depth

The opera opens with a brilliant “Toccata” for an instrumental ensemble,

a model for the later opera overture and for the use of instrumental pieces to

help articulate dramatic action. Orfeo is also one of the earliest examples of

specific instrumentation indicated by a composer. Monteverdi assigns particular instruments throughout the opera for particular expressive purposes. Some important dramatic choices that became normative for opera through the next three centuries are already established. The composer uses

recitative to carry the dramatic action and dialogue. Closed songs in symmetri-

cally conceived forms are used to set the general mood; at this date these

commonly take the form of strophic or varied strophic songs, sometimes with

Chapter 13

instrumental ritornello passages between the stanzas. The occurrence of dance rhythms indicates that dancing was part of the staging, One important song in Orfeo is Orpheus’s “Possente spirto,” which he sings to enchant Charon, the guardian of the entrance to Hades. The song is a set of variations, and Monteverdi published it with two versions of the solo vocal part, one highly ornamented. This gives us some insight into the performance practices of singers in that time, (The successive stanzas of “Possente

spirto” also employ a series of changing instrumental accompaniments.) Developments in Italian Opera

Opera soon spread to still more cities in Italy. The smaller courts competed with each other in staging operas as lavishly as their finances would allow Two major cities in particular pursued unique directions, guided by their own. characters In Rome it was quite natural that librettists and composers would explore subjects from sacred rather than ancient Greek sources. Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima e di corpo had anticipated this tendency. A prominent example from a slightly later stage was Sant’Alessio (1632), the life of Saint Alexis, by Stefano Landi (ca.

1590-1655)

In 1637 the city of Venice, with its tremendous wealth and characteristic sense of commercial enterprise, became the first city to open a public opera house that sold tickets and operated on the basis of profit, It soon had several competing theaters. This was an almost unique situation in the seventeenth century; only Hamburg (another commercial port city, which might appropriately be considered the Venice of Germany) followed this lead. Monteverdi, who moved to Venice in 1613, became one of the city’s leading opera composers Stylistic Trends

Some noteworthy stylistic trends gradually formed in the Italian opera. First among these was the tendency to concentrate increasingly on solo singing. Choruses, which had been very important to the early operas of Peri and Monteverdi, gradually exited the stage. The two styles of solo singing, par-

lando dialogue and lyrical song, diverged more and more. Monteverdi's last

opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (The coronation of Poppea), employed free and rapid shifts from one style to another for rhetorical effect, even within a single sentence. In the works of his successors, however, beginning with those of Francesco Cavalli (1602-1672) and even more in the case of the operas of

Antonio Cesti (1623-1669), the styles became increasingly compartmental-

ized into more extended passages of recitative, each leading to a separate,

Se

170

The Early Baroque

171

closed aria. The recitative became rapid and not especially melodic. With

lyrical contours and musically conceived form, the aria momentarily arrested the action, providing emotional expression and musical gratification

There were two principal aria styles. The so-called bel canto (beautiful

singing) type used generally syllabic settings and relatively slow motion (usu-

ally in triple meter), which gave the singers the opportunity to let the vocal sound resonate. The contrasting type was a florid style featuring rapid coloratura passages; it showed off the performer's vocal agility. The structures of these arias also became somewhat standardized into two patterns. One model

was the variation, either in strophic form or with a melody unfolding over

a short ostinato bass formula. The other was the symmetrical ternary design, which, as we shall discover, later evolved into an elaborate, large-scale scheme:

Like the chorus, instrumental pieces became less and less important, with the exception of the opening number. In Sant/Alessio Landi had raised the curtain with a structure that was quite successful, a two-part plan comprising

a slow, homorhythmic opening followed by a fast, canzona-style section In the middle of the century the plots of some of the operas became rather complex. Subplots, sometimes involving comic characters, mingled with the main action. This trend jeopardized the dramatic integrity of the libretto, to be

sure, but it offered greater entertainment value. Also important to the entertainment value of opera was the component of sheer spectacle. Designers and builders contrived fabulous sets, including onstage waterfalls and fountains, back-lighted scenery, and fire-breathing

monsters. Machinery made possible almost instantaneous scene shifts, gods

descending from the clouds, and the like. When we remember that these

machines were operated by manual labor, we must admire the ingenuity of their designers. On the other hand, the use of open flame lighting accounted

fora large number of theatre fires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Vocal Chamber Music

Marco Scacchi included in the category stylus cubicularis, or chamber style, all secular vocal music other than opera. He identified within this category three different types, according to their scoring The first type of chamber music was the vocal ensemble song in the

tradition of the sixteenth-century madrigal, which was intended for a small group of singers, presumably singing one to a part and without instrumental

assistance. Such pieces continued to be composed, published, and sung after 1600, of course.

Claudio Monteverdi's books of madrigals had no accompaniment through most of Book 5. Beginning with the last six numbers of Book 5, however, basso

172

Chapter 13

continuo accompaniment was provided, and it was added fora reissue of Book 4. Such pieces would fall into Scacchi’s second subcategory, solo or ensemble works with continuo, as would, of course, the solo arias and madrigals of Caccini’s Le nuove musiche.

The third subcategory of chamber music comprised pieces with additional independent instrumental parts in the concertato manner. (Fig. 13.1) Such parts might function as accompaniment to the voice, but they were particularly useful to provide introductory or interludelike sinfonias and ritornellos, and to make pictorial or affective contributions in quasi-dramatic songs. A masterpiece of this type is Monteverdi's dramatic madrigal “II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” published in Book 8 (1624). In setting to music Torquato Tasso’s touching story of the tragedy of the crusader Tancred who unknowingly fights and kills his beloved Clorinda, Monteverdi employed not only the two characters and a narrator but also a string ensemble that depicts the action and, through the use of written-out, measured tremolos that Monteverdi called stile concitato (agitated style), the affective experience of the characters Texture and Form

In the stylus cubicularis the composer was more likely to be concerned with problems of musical coherence than in the stylus theatralis, where the action provided a strong sense of direction and a counterfoil to the music. This resulted in special treatments of both texture and form The purely monodic texture of the new music offered more clarity than

the interwoven sound of polyphonic music. On the other hand, monodic singing left a significant gap in musical interest. It therefore became popular to compose and sing duets with basso continuo accompaniment, where two

voices could provide sufficient contrapuntal interaction to maintain interest, yet preserve a degree of clarity. Composers cultivated a variety of forms as well. As we have noticed, Caccini’s Nuove musiche had incorporated two different forms: the madrigal, which adopted a free form controlled by text as its Renaissance predecessor had; and the aria, a simple strophic song. Also common was the use of free melodic variation over repeated ostinato bass formulas (Ex. 13.1). Some of

these bass lines lasted an entire strophe; two popular ones were the romanesca

and ruggiero. Such forms are called strophic variation. Alternatively, the bass

might be shorter, lasting only a few measures. Two types of pieces that use this procedure are the chaconne and passacaglia. A very common bass was the descending minor tetrachord (two whole steps downward followed by a half step), which might be disguised by octave transfer or by chromatic passing motion. This became a standard device for indicating the affection of sadness, and it is sometimes called the lamento bass.

Figure 13.1 Pieter de Hooch

(ca. 1629-1677),

The

Musi

arty (ca. 1665).

The

Netherlands painter here showsa g enth-century mus! ians with instruments, forming an ensemble to make chamt yer music for their own enjoyment. Here are a recorder te, and violin playing with the singer, who keeps time with her right ind, A bass viol rests at one side. (Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund,

51.355

Early in the seventeenth century theterm c ntata (sung) w pplied to works in strophic variation form and sometimes to those in other forms as well, Soon this designation came to mean a multisectional piece using contrasting singing styles, and it took on quite different implications Sacred Music

In Scacchi’s classification all church music is subsumed under the categor stylus ecclesiasticus. As e case of chamber music, however, the theorist recognized several different ty pes of this music.

174

Chapter 13

Example 13.1 Standard bass patterns of the early Baroque. Romanesca

Ruggiero Chaconne

The first three actually belong to the sixteenth century but continued into

the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. The primary ecclesiastical style was

the polyphonic, a cappella, Netherlands-style motet and Mass. In this type of

music the counterpoint was still strictly controlled by the rules of panconsonance laid out by Zarlino. This style might also have been known as prima

prattica, stile antico, or, perhaps more commonly, stylus gravis (Latin, serious

style), It became so thoroughly identified with sacred music that the sound of this harmonic and contrapuntal manner in a secular piece could serve as an

allusion to the church and sacred matters. A second subtype of the ecclesiasti-

cal style was the polychoral scoring of the Venetian tradition. A third group was made up of works in the polychoral style but with concertato instruments.

Scacchi takes for granted that this music still uses the harmonic language of

the stile antico.

The Sacred Concerto

The final and most progressive type of church music identified by Scacchi was the sacred concerto. In this type the modern style is applied to the composition of motets; in other words, the sacred concerto developed from the Renaissance

motet in the same way that vocal chamber music with basso continuo arose from the sixteenth-century madrigal. The first composer to publish monodic

pieces under the designation “concerto” was the Italian Lodovico Grossi da Viadana (ca. 1560-1627), whose Cento concerti ecclesiastici (One hundred

church concertos) appeared in 1602. These concertos—motets for one, two,

or three voices with an unfigured basso continuo—still employ the simple conservative harmonies of the stile antico. Because of their harmonic restraint

they constitute only a tentative step into the new period.

The Early Baroque

175

In 1613 Monteverdi left Mantua for Venice to assume the duties of mae-

stro di cappella at St. Mark’s Cathedral, following in the footsteps of Willaert, Rore, and Zarlino. He composed equally brilliantly in all styles, of course, but

it was most significant that the hero of the seconda prattica should be brought

to the most prestigious church music directorship in Europe. He had proved

his mastery of the stile antico in a parody Mass based on a motet by the early

sixteenth-century Netherlands composer Nicolas Gombert (ca. 1495-1560),

but his other sacred music did not neglect the affective possibilities of the stile

moderno, and he may be said to have brought sacred music definitively into the

Baroque aesthetic. For example, his setting of the Office of Vespers, published with the Mass in 1610, employs the monodic texture with basso continuo and demands extreme virtuosity from the solo singers In the north the new style in sacred music found its greatest composer in Heinrich Schiitz (1585-1672), who worked primarily in Dresden. From 1609 to 1612 Schiitz visited Venice to learn from Giovanni Gabrieli, and he went to

that city again in 1628-1629 to absorb the newer manner of Monteverdi. He

established a synthesis that combined the monodic style and affective aesthetic

of the Italians with the German language and taste. Schiitz's most important music is sacred, including both Lutheran and Roman Catholic works.

His

three collections of Symphoniae sacrae (Sacred symphonies) follow Gabriel's Sacrae symphoniae. During the period when Germany was embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War, he was compelled to write for more limited forces and produced Kleine geistliche Concerten (Little sacred concertos) with equal success.

‘Among Schiitz’s sacred music are some quasi-dramatic, multimovement

works, an Easter oratorio, a Christmas oratorio, Die sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuze (The seven words of Jesus Christ on the cross), and the Passions

according to Matthew, Luke, and John. These works reflect the apparently

irresistible influence of the Baroque love of the dramatic on the music of the

church.

Oratorio The oratorio developed from the motet and sacred concerto, as an outgrowth

of the musical settings of biblical texts in dialogue. In this, it was as natural a development as the liturgical drama of the Middle Ages. It is not easy to

distinguish the moment at which the first fully developed oratorio appeared Such pieces were variously called motet, dialogue, concerto, cantata, and historia. As the composers’ imaginations led them to develop the interaction between characters and to portray dramatic events in music, these pieces could no longer be incorporated into the liturgy. They were performed in a prayer hall adjoining the church sanctuary, which was called oratorio and gave its name to the genre sometime around 1640.

176 — Chapter 13, The stories of the oratorios were taken from the Bible, especially from the Old Testament, which is rich in dramatic episodes, Modem poets filled in details and invented new dialogue to add length and interest. If the text was in Latin, as was the case in the early oratorios, the work was an oratorio latino; if it was in Italian (or another language in another country), it was an oratorio

volgare. The general tendency was for the oratorio latino to be in prose,

incorporating the words and following the style of the Bible, while the oratorio

volgare was commonly in poetic verse. It became common to divide the action into two large sections, like the acts of a play or opera The action was not staged as in opera but was narrated by a singer known as testo (text) or historicus, and this became a crucial distinction between opera

and oratorio. While most of the singing fell to the narrator and the solo singers who took the lines of the individual characters in the story, there was a greater use of chorus than in opera, for the mechanics of bringing a chorus onto an operatic stage did not inhibit the creator of the oratorio. Thus the oratorio allowed more variety and contrast in vocal sound than the opera did, partially compensating in this way for what the oratorio lacked in costumes, stage design, and movement The oratorio became very popular among devout lay Christians, especially in Rome, It could even serve as a substitute entertainment during Lent when

the opera houses were closed in deference to the penitential season

The composer most responsible for the early establishment of the oratorio

was Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674), who worked primarily in Rome. His works were mostly composed for a society of devout laymen, the brotherhood

of the Sanctissimo Crocifisso (Most Holy Crucifix) at the elite, upper-class Church of San Marcello. Such societies were one result of the aggressive Jesuit movement in the period following the Counter-Reformation Seventeenth-Century Instrumental Music

In his list of musical styles Scacchi did not include purely instrumental genres atall. Nevertheless, the early seventeenth century was an important period for the development of instrumental music, which steadily gained importance in musical life. Several instrumental genres were at a crucial transitional stage between the Renaissance and the mature forms of the late Baroque, and significant changes took place. The rich variety of instruments available to composers in the early seventeenth century is displayed in the three-volume book Syntagma musicum by the German composer, theorist, and organist Michael Praetorius (1571— 1621). Praetorius also suggested imaginative ways of using instruments in performances of sacred vocal music to create contrasts of scoring,

The Early Baroque

177

It is of primary importance to observe that the early Baroque maintained the types of instrumental music known to the Renaissance. A number of new

factors in musical thinking came together, however, to direct those older

forms along new paths. These include the doctrine of the affections, the concertato principle, the new harmonic language, and ideas about abstract musical form.

The Ricercar

Around the tum of the century, composers must have begun to realize that the ricercar, which had been the most advanced instrumental genre of the six-

teenth century, had an inherent problem. In taking the motet as its model, it

adopted a free form consisting of a series of interlocking sections based on various points of imitation; but while a motet made sense of the free form

through the meaning in its text, the textless ricercar risked giving the impression that the music wandered aimlessly from one point to the next.

The solution to this problem, achieved in the ricercars and other similar

works such as the keyboard fantasia, was to concentrate on working out one point of imitation or subject through an entire piece. Besides providing unity to the piece, this use of one predominant idea was in keeping with the Baroque aesthetic assumption that an entire piece or movement should be governed by a single affection. In order to provide variety, the subject might be altered at each new polyphonic exposition by such techniques as rhythmic augmentation or diminution, and it might be accompanied by several different counter-

melodic ideas in turn. The pervasive use of a single subject (in this early period usually limited to a single tonal area) gave coherence to extensive compositions. The Sonata

The canzona developed along what we might consider the opposite path to that of the ricercar. Endangered by the same potential undirectedness as the

ricercar, the canzona tended to fall apart into short, contrasting sections that maintained interest more through contrast than through unity. The result was

the rise of the sonata (meaning “sounded,” i.e., “played”; compare cantata) Ultimately the divisions between the sections of the sonata resulted in the

formation of clearly distinguished movements. These were related by contrasting tempos, generally the alternation of slow and fast. The individual movements later grew to have their own internal forms. While the ricercar and fantasia continued as thoroughly contrapuntal

types, the sonata was more modern and adopted the texture of one or a small

number of melodic parts accompanied by basso continuo. (Fig. 13.2) For the

Figure 13.2 Keyboard instruments, with their role of playing basso continuo in all sorts of music grew immensely in importance during the Baroque period. This harpsichord dates from 1618, itwas built by the Amsterdam craftsman Andreas Ruckers the Elder. (Musik Instrumenten Museum, Staatliches Institut fiir

Musikforschung Preugischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

same reason that the chamber vocal duet was popular, the texture of two solo instruments and continuo thrived in the sonata. This texture is commonly called trio texture, and a sonata that employs it is a trio sonata The violin family of instruments, which could more easily handle the demands of the florid Baroque style, began to replace the Renaissance viols in the seventeenth century. Most trio sonatas call for two violins, keyboard, and cello. Other combinations of instruments are also possible, such as recorders, flutes, and oboes on the upper lines and bassoon on the bass part. Sets of Variations

The construction of sets of variations offered composers a simple but effective way to achieve both unity and variety in musical form during this early period in the growth of instrumental music. Such sets were often called partita, since they were made up of many partes. Variations sometimes explored the possibilities available in ornamenting a given melody. Another type of variations

The Early Baroque

179

borrowed the same harmonic formulas used for vocal dance songs in straphic variation form, such as the romanesca and ruggiero. Still another type, especially suited for Lutheran church organists, employed a chorale melody as a cantus firmus, stated either straightforwardly or with melodic embellishment, around which other parts wove the series of variations. Such a practice naturally produces a chorale partita. Early examples appear in the 1624 collection Tabulatura nova by the organist Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654), who served the

court at Halle in Germany, This collection also contains variation sets based on secular melodies. The title Tabulatura nova refers to the appearance, unusual at that time, of polyphonic parts written out in open score to show clearly the contrapuntal interplay of voices. In fact Scheidt’s notation is not tablature atall Dance Music

Like the Renaissance the Baroque era produced a great deal of dance music and stylized pieces based on dance music. The individual dances tended to

adopt a binary form with two halves roughly equal in length and separated by a strong cadence, each half commonly repeated. The practice of pairing slow and fast dances was gradually extended to more movements, forming a suite. Suites loosely followed a simple plan of contrasting tempos and rhythmic characters. There might be a free piece by

way of introduction, sometimes labeled prelude. The opening dance movement was now the allemande, in duple rhythm at a moderate tempo and with a characteristic anacrusic beginning. This was followed by a courante, faster

and using triple or compound rhythms. After this pair there would often be a

sarabande, featuring triple meter with a distinctive agogic stress on the second beat of the measure and a very slow tempo. The remainder of the suite was quite flexible and might include various other dance types. Among these the

gigue eventually emerged as the favorite choice for the final movement, since

its fast compound rhythm lent a brilliant touch to the end of a suite. The rational planning of the multimovement shape of the suite—particularly the

ordering of allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue—became more or less

standard in Germany after about 1650 due to the influence of the keyboard

suites of Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667). In France and England there

was more flexibility. In Italy the suite idea was used in the various movements

of the sonata but was not much pursued as an independent type.

One possibility in the suite was to have the movements share some funda-

mental musical idea, so that they constituted a manifestation of the theme-

and-variations principle. The dance suites in Johann Hermann Schein’s (1586-1630)

important collection Banchetto musicale (1617)

illustrate the

variation process. The allemande was given a regular duple statement followed by a strict variation in triple meter. In addition, the variation principle was

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employed more flexibly in a general sharing of the allemande’s motivic material by the pavane-galliard pair and the courante that comprise the remainder of the suite. A consequence of this is that the term partita, which could identify a variation set, sometimes also denoted a suite Improvisatory Instrumental Music

Improvisatory types of pieces continued to be used during the Baroque era, especially by keyboard players. These improvisatory pieces were often entitled “toccata” or “prelude.” In such works the free, virtuosic passagework might be paired with contrapuntal sections resembling fragments of ricercars or canzonas. Questions for Reflection What historical factors led to the distinction between church, chamber,

and theatrical styles in music in the early seventeenth century? How have more recent periods of music history maintained or forsaken the separation of styles by social function? In what sense is the music of Baroque opera dramatic? In what senses is it not truly dramatic? For what kinds of singers were the Baroque monodic madrigal, aria, and cantata intended, and how would the social contexts in which they were likely to be performed differ from the usual situations in which they are most often

heard today? How does that difference affect the singer's and hearer's experi-

ence of the music?

How did the effects that the Thirty Years’ War had on music compare to those of the Hundred Years’ War? Is it possible to generalize about the effects

wars have on the development of music or the arts in general? © How did the appearance and development of the oratorio differ from or resemble that of the medieval liturgical drama? “What factors in the early seventeenth century contributed to the increasing importance and sophistication of purely instrumental music? Suggestions for Further Reading

A standard history of opera is Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera, 2d ed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). The early history of opera is outlined in Robert Donington, The Rise of Opera (London: Faber and Faber,

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1981). A translation of Peri’s preface to Euridice can be found in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950) The authoritative work on the oratorio is Howard E. Smither, A History of the Oratorio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977-1987), of which the first volume deals with the period under consideration in this chapter. One biography of Schiitz is Hans Joachim Moser, Heinrich Schiitz, trans C. F, Platteicher (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959). David D. Boyden, The History of Violin Playing from Its Origins to 1761 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Willi Apel, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) give valuable information on the development of instrumental music in the early Baroque.

THE HIGH BAROQUE

French Opera in the Seventeenth Century

The Background The musical situation in France in the second haif of the seventeenth century differed from that of other countries and periods, By way of historical background it is important to note that in the Thirty Years War France had succeeded in asserting its integrity against the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire. The efforts of the French prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), established the idea of the modern nation-state and centralized the government under the absolute rule of King Louis XIII (©. 1610-1643). After Louis's death there was a decade's delay before his son came of age, during which Louis XI 's wife, Anne of Austria, acted as regent, aided by her prime minister Jules Mazarin (1602-1661),

an Italian. Louis XIV took the reins of government in 1653 and ruled until 1715. He strengthened the absolutist monarchy and cultivated a brilliant court life in his new palace at Versailles, (Fig. 14.1) Of course music had an important place in the court, and its development was powerfully affected by the political situation Within the area of cultural affairs the French kings took up the tradition of academicism that we have already noted in the Renaissance with Baif’s Académie de poésie et de musique. In the seventeenth century official academies were founded under royal sponsorship. The first was the Académie francaise, set up in 1635 under Richelieu to study and cultivate the belles lettres. Its greatest figures were the dramatists Corneille and Racine, who brought the genre of stage tragedy from the Greek models up to the present. There followed in 1648 an Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and, under Louis XIV, a whole series of new academies, for dance, graphic arts, the sciences, music, and architecture The Académie royale de musique was established in 1669, The purpose of 183,

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As a result

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French Baroque music tended to be more Apollonian than that of other nations at the same time. France had a special tradition of court entertainment in the form of the ballet de cour. The ballet of the early seventeenth century was not a stage production performed by professionals but a participatory art form with the courtiers themselves as the dancers. Following a quasi-dramatic plan, the ballet combined dance with instrumental music, spoken narrative and dialogue, airs and ensemble singing, and all the trappings of dramatic spectacle costumes, sets, and machines, In several different ballets, including a spectacular ballet of 1653, the Ballet de la nuit, the young King Louis XIV was presented as the sun, the allegorical center of the universe; the nickname “Sun King” stuck with him, for it seemed to reflect not only his glory but also the way in which French society radiated from the royal court and the manner in which the nobility revolved around its center. The ballet exerted a powerful influence on the development of opera in France; the fact that it occupied the place that opera sought to invade led to the inclusion of a considerable quantity of dance in French opera when it did arise

The Beginnings of French Opera Not surprisingly, opera first appeared during Mazarin’s premiership. He brought several operas from his homeland for performance at the French court in the 1640s. The French did not find the Italian style congenial to their taste, however, and soon attempted to produce a national operatic style of their own The librettist Pierre Perrin (ca.

1620-1675) criticized the Italian manner in his

preface to the Pastorale d'Issy of 1659, written by him and composed by Robert Cambert (ca. 1628-1677). The Italian opera was too long, he claimed, its recitatives monotonous, its poetry stilted, and the words of the arias unintelligible; furthermore, the Italian castrati “horrified women and made men snicker.” Perrin was granted the royal privitege to establish the academy for music, which meant that he held a monopoly on opera in France Perrin soon lost the academy to the Florentine expatriate composer JeanBaptiste Lully (1632-1687). Lully had come to Paris in 1646, and he rose rapidly to prominence through his skills in both art and politics, He was, in fact, perhaps the most successful schemer and manipulator among all the great composers in the history of music. French music in the second half of the seventeenth century and even beyond was largely dominated by the powerful influence of Lully. From 1653 Lully was instrumental composer to Louis XIV. As a member of Louis's orchestra known as the Vingt-quatre violons du roi (the King’s twentyfour strings), Lully was impatient with existing performance practices, including general lack of discipline and the inclination of the players to embellish their own parts freely, without regard for the ensemble. In 1656 he established the rival Petits violons (Little strings), with first sixteen and later twenty-one

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players. With this group Lully set new standards for discipline and ensemble The simplicity of his style appealed naturally to French aesthetic taste, and the two

groups were reconciled in 1664.

In the meantime, Lully also served in the ballet. He was a dancer from 1653, when he danced beside Louis in the Ballet de la nuit, until 1663, and

he became superintendent of music in 1661. With the comic playwright Moliére, Lully created comédies-ballets between 1663 and 1672. These productions combined the traditions of the Italian pastoral operas and the French ballet de cour and laid the groundwork for a fully developed French type of opera. When he bought the license for the Académie de musique from Perrin in 1672, this position and several royal patents gave Lully practically complete control of musical life in France.

The culmination of Lully’s musical style came in the operas that he called tragédies lyriques, on which he collaborated with the librettist Philippe Quinault (1635-1688).

These productions, which followed the classical plan of

five acts, adopted classical mythological plots replete ences to the great nation of France and its king. They ballet tradition a considerable quantity of dancing, the chorus than the Italian opera of the same period,

with laudatory refertook from the French more participation of and lavish machinery

and sets,

Musical Style in French Baroque Opera The music of the solo singing in French opera tends to make the distinction between the recitative and the aria less obvious than in Italian opera. The recitative does not patter along so rapidly, and in good French tradition it is

quite carefully measured according to the requirements of diction. Asa result

the scores often show rather flexible barring. The airs derive their style more from the simple air de cour than from the Italian aria. While they are more

metrically regular than the recitative, they are still simple and generally syl-

labic.

Instrumental music in Lullian opera had the usual functions of accompa-

nying singing and articulating the dramatic action, and naturally it also supplied dance accompaniments. An influential contribution to the history of instrumental form was the French overture, which found a particularly satisfac-

tory manner of treating the opening of a large-scale musical work. The over-

ture began with a slow and stately passage in homorhythmic style, generally

featuring dotted rhythms. There followed a faster, lighter, commonly fugal section, and there might be a brief return to the opening style at the end Following the practice of the Vingt-quatre violons du roi, French string orchestral writing is in five parts and thus is weightier than Italian scoring, which

typically has only four or even as few as three parts. The French also preferred

plenty of wind instruments; they had a particular liking for the nasal doublereed sound.

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English Music in the Seventeenth Century The First Stuarts

In the first half of the seventeenth century England was under the rule of the Stuart kings James | and Charles I, In the field of church music the Anglican Services and the full and verse anthems of the late Renaissance continued to develop. The secular vocal repertoire moved from polyphonic madrigals toward accompanied solo song. In instrumental music keyboard dances and variations and ensemble fantasies were predominant. The court had a tradition somewhat comparable to the French court ballet in the masque, a variety entertainment with recitatives, songs, choruses, dances, and costumes. No less a literary figure than John Milton contributed to the genre in the masque Comus (1634), written in collaboration with the composer Henry Lawes (1596-1662), Because there was also a thriving theater, incidental music for plays was especially cultivated, and opera did not make an immediate impression, The Commonwealth

During the period of Cromwell's Commonwealth (1649-1660) the Puritan ideals of the Roundheads deeply affected the English arts, especially music The musical influence of the flamboyant court cultures of the European continent was severely limited. Because the musical establishments of the Cavalier court and church were disbanded, domestic music held a significant place and the smaller, simpler genres, such as song, appear more prominent in the music history of the period. The theater, whose morals the Puritans considered highly suspect, was aggressively suppressed. Musical concerts, however, were not banned, and under that guise plays could be given with a great deal of inserted music, The result seems a bit artificial and patchworklike in retrospect, but such hybrids kept English theater alive The Restoration

Alter the Stuart Restoration with the accession of Charles II to the throne in 1660, music was revived in both court and church. The earlier English traditions of secular masques and sacred Services and anthems were resumed, and the influence of Italian and French styles began to be felt in earnest. In sacred music the anthem developeda mature Baroque style. The choral sound that emerged during this time has a uniquely English character, in which concentration focusses on clear, idiomatic declamation of text in a predominantly homophonic texture, In verse anthems the solo sections generally

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resemble the simpler, declamatory French style rather than the ornate Italian

manner. Still heard occasionally are expressive simultaneous cross-relations

inherited from the English composers of the late Renaissance Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the leading English composer in the last part of the century, was born just in time for the Restoration and worked as both a royal anda church musician, holding the posts of composer to the king's violin ensemble and of organist at the royal court and at Westminster Abbey. In his short life he served three kings: Charles Il, James Il, and William III

Opera did not become a truly native genre in England. Venus and Adonis

(168+ or 1685) by the composer John Blow (1649-1708), though it was fully

composed in music, was called a masque and included court participants

Purcell’s masterful short opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), written for a girls’

school, is atypical. More representative is the “semiopera” The Fairy Queen

(1692), in which an abbreviated and adapted spoken version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream provides the framework for a series of brief unrelated masques. The effect is certainly that of a curious mish-mash by modern standards, but the work has the virtue of combining the art of En-

gland’s greatest playwright with that of one of its finest composers. Purcell’s music in these theatrical compositions shows his love of the English choral anthem, perhaps some influence of the French in the approach to declamation in recitative, and a gift for the Italian style of operatic solo singing. Especially noteworthy are the arias constructed as variations over a repeating ground

bass, a type at which Purcell ranks with the greatest of all seventeenth-century

composers. ‘Composers in the ages of court patronage had much to do that was tem-

porary and practical. Court composers of this period produced many fine occasional pieces, which unfortunately are not suitable for our common per-

formance situations in the twentieth century. Such works include Purcell’s

odes and welcome songs to celebrate such events as royal arrivals, weddings, and birthdays. They combine solo and choral settings with much fine music but have texts that often depend on the specific occasion for which they were composed. The odes for St. Cecilia's Day, honoring the patron saint of music,

are more practicable Among Purcell’s instrumental works are keyboard and ensemble pieces The polyphonic fantasy or fancy for viols still had a public, though the Italian sonata with basso continuo was increasing in popularity.

Italian Opera

Toward the end of the seventeenth century Italian opera developeda sharply defined style. Its general characteristics are often associated with the southern city of Naples, though they were by no means exclusive to composers working

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there. The leading composer of the Neapolitan opera was Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725),

Scarlatti had come to Naples from Rome, and while he did not

create the style, his works represent its culmination

The change of approach during the century is striking, Largely due to the

efforts of the librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750), the plots were tightened

up, the mixture of serious and comic material was sorted out into separate scenes, and eventually, in order to raise the literary level of the gente, the comedy disappeared, leaving the genre we know as opera seria A thinning and sorting process also took place in the music, The standard

orchestral opening number, known in Italy as sinfonia rather than overture

usually was the only purely instrumental element as dancing declined. The sinfonia consisted of three rather independent movements in contrasting

styles and tempos, ordered fast-slow-fast. The use of choruses was abandoned

almost entirely, as was most ensemble singing, so that the opera became a

chain of alternating recitatives and arias The style of recitative became simpler, employing rapid, free rhythms and limited melodic contours. Most of the recitative was supported only by the

basso continuo, which tended to play at a very slow harmonic rhythm; this

type was called simple recitative (in the nineteenth century it came to be known as seco, or “dry”), The entire string ensemble might be used for special effects, giving the scoring known as accompagnato, Segments of recitative in

which still more passion was to be expressed, as often occurred at the end of

a recitative passage, might be set in arioso style, with more melodic interest and generally a more rapid continuo motion

The arias grew increasingly florid and virtuosic. As a consequence of the

Baroque commitment

to maintaining the governing affection by musical

means throughout a piece, each aria normally adopted a particular affective

style based on characteristic melodic-rhythmic figures. Thus, a “rage” aria

might have wide-ranging scales and arpeggios, a heroic aria could employ

trumpetlike motives, a mournful one would use chromatic motion and “sighing” slurs, and so on. By the end of the century the closed form adopted by most arias was ternary form. This led to the full-fledged da capo aria structure In this plan

there were two large, contrasting parts, the second followed by a return to the first indicated simply by the marking “da capo.” The first part opened with an

instrumental ritornello in the main key, establishing the aria’s affective content.

Asection for the solo singer followed, setting out the first half of the aria’s text, departing from the opening key and proceeding to another. In this contrasting, key came a return of the instrumental ensemble with ritornello material. Then

followed a second solo section that repeated the text of the first solo section modulating back to the main key. Finally the part closed with a return to the

ritornello, again in the main key. The second large part, containing the second

half of the aria text, was predominantly the province of the singer and featured further key contrast. In outline, the form operated as follows

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Part 1 Rit Main key

Part 2 Text A Solo Al

Rit.2 New key

Text A Solo A2

Text B Rit3 Solo Main key Other key(s)

Part 1 da capo

Important here is the coordination of textual and thematic material with a

harmonic plan and scoring to create a musical design that operates on several levels simultaneously. This became an increasingly important process through the eighteenth century.

Free embellishment of the musical line by solo performers was inherent in Baroque performing tradition, and especially so in the da capo aria. The vocalist was expected to ornament the return of the first large part of the piece to the limit of his or her skill, though within the sense of the music and the words.

The technical virtuosity of these singers was undoubtedly impressive. The gteatest of the singers were the castrati, whose beautiful boy soprano voices were preserved by surgery, and who grew to great physical strength and imposing size and presence without their voices changing into the usual masculine register. The castrati took the heroic roles in the Italian opera, to the shock

or amusement of audiences from other nations, They were the masters of vocal technique, but later, as they and the music for which they were suited went out of fashion, their skills were no longer taught

With the practice of improvised embellishment, we naturally find composers and critics complaining of tasteless selE indulgence on the part of many a prima donna and primo uomo. An amusing satirical treatise on the subject, II teatro alla moda (The fashionable theater) by the composer Benedetto Mar-

cello (1686-1739), indicates that opera was often controlled by the singers, their protectors, the special-effects crew, and the animal trainers, rather than

by the librettist and composer, who, in turn, knew nothing of each other's business. At its best, however, the Italian opera of the period offers glorious voeal music based on the evocation of powerful passions

The Cantata and Other Vocal Chamber Music

Vocal chamber music continued to thrive and develop in the High Baroque

The most sophisticated type was the cantata, As the genre evolved, it tended

more and more to form a series of articulated movements, alternating recitatives and arias. The texts became like monodramas for solo voice with basso

continuo, possibly obligato instruments, or even small orchestral ensembles.

As would be expected, the forms of the arias duplicated those of the opera.

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Cantatas had their greatest success in Italy, but they were also popular in all the other nations of Europe Smaller vocal pieces also existed. Simple strophic songs or one-movement, closed-form arias had a market especially among middle-class amateur musicians. (Fig, 14.2) These pieces generally do not pretend to the status of high art, but there are occasional delights among them. Lute-accompanied settings were eventually supplanted by those with basso continuo. In France the air was still cultivated. England got some fine songs from Purcell and other composers. The German burghers’ wives and daughters sang continuo-Lieder and Arien that characteristically extolled moral virtues German Musical Genres

In the second half of the seventeenth century Germany was more influenced by French and Italian music than influential on the music of those countries The French and Italians had never looked to Germany for musical leadership, but German composers often imitated the styles of music developed in France and Italy, and they traveled to those countries to learn the latest musical techniques, as we have already seen in the case of Schiitz In northern Germany at this time there arose ideas and styles that were peculiar to the region. The dominance of Lutheranism there helped create a musical culture quite different from those of the Catholic-dominated regions. The music of the Lutheran church occupies an impressive place in the history of the development of vocal music in Baroque Germany. In addition to chorale arrangements and solo pieces and ensembles for several voices with basso continuo, the sacred concerto developed into a sophisticated multimovement construction. The leading composers of this repertoire were Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), who served as organist in Liibeck in the far north of Germany, and Johann Pachelbel (1653~1706), who worked in central Germany and was therefore more influenced by Italian styles, including the Venetian polychoral tradition. The largest of their works combined sections for full choir; passages for one, two, or sometimes three solo singers; and instrumental ensemble or basso continuo accompaniment, The repertory of chorale melodies sometimes provided thematic material, and chorales could appear as cantus firmus (generally in the top voice) or in imitative treatment.

Keyboard Music In the field of keyboard music the German church organists, among them Buxtehude and Pachelbel, entered their heyday in the seventeenth century The needs of the service led to the cultivation of chorale settings for organ. To introduce congregational chorale singing they employed the chorale prelude, a

192

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ducing each of its phrases by motives from the chorale presented in imitative texture in the other parts. This technique is known as Vorimitation (loreimitation, or pre-imitation). It has already been mentioned that chorales could provide the basis for variations in the chorale partita, a type especially cultivated by Georg Bohm (1661-1733) of Liineburg, where Johann Sebastian

Bach gained some of his early experience. An elaborate fugal setting of choralederived subjects produced the chorale fantasia or chorale fugue. All such works based on preexisting melodies fall into the classification of gebunden (bound) forms Of course the organists also explored genres that were frei ({ree). Among these were the descendants of the now-familiar improvisatory preludes and toccatas, These were often combined with fugal composition, either by alternation of virtuosic sections with more rigorous imitative contrapuntal ones or by the pairing of separate movements in the two contrasting styles. Such pieces did not form part of the church service, but they were commonly played before or after the worship itself Musical Drama

Germany’s native musical drama in the years around 1700 was the Singspiel, a type that employed spoken dialogue and a vocal style more like that of song than that of the elaborate aria. The princely courts mostly preferred to import Italian opera. As mentioned earlier, Hamburg followed Venice in opening a public opera theater in 1678, The most important composer there was the music director Reinhard Keiser (1674—1739), whose stage works in both Italian and German are the best of the period

The Development of Instrumental Forms and Idioms

In the course of the seventeenth century the increasing interest in instrumental music independent of vocal contexts or models led to the development of idiomatic styles associated with individual instruments. The violin family was fully developed and became the usual core of instrumental ensemble groupings, Players achieved a technique that allowed the performance of lines that vastly exceeded the range, flexibility, and speed limits of earlier melodies based on vocal ideals. (In turn the singers’ techniques began to imitate those of instruments, and in much mature Baroque vocal music the tables have been tured so that music for voices adopts an instrumental idiom.) The concertato ideal led to the exploitation of a wide variety of instrumental colors. Most of the orchestral instruments began to approach their modern

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forms, though they all continued to evolve over the next couple of centuries The Baroque composers freely employed recorders and flutes, oboes and bassoons, trumpets and timpani, as well as strings and keyboard instruments Also available were horns (still associated with the hunt), trombones (often used to support choral singing in churches), and various other instruments, from the old viols and lute to the mandolin

Style Developments in Instrumental Music The rise of instrumental music also required musical structures that would maintain attention through a balance of unity and contrast and would have a satisfactory coherence and overall form, These goals were reached in different ways in various genres. To generalize we can offer several broad observations The idea of the domination of a movement by a single affection created a high degree of unity within any movement, for the affection should be produced by concentration on one expressive musical figure, which would give focus and also provide an insistent rhythm and melodic motive throughout the movement. Contrast was likely to be produced by concertato scoring or by the so-called terraced dynamic changes that imitated concertato effects A most significant and far-reaching discovery was that musical shape could be created by departure from and return to a main key area, Further, these departures and returns could be articulated by melodic events and scoring changes. These procedures at last compensated for the absence of the coherence provided to vocal music by a text. We now turn to a consideration of the application of these ideas in various instrumental genres Fugue

In the first half of the century the fugue had already been anticipated by the use of a single subject throughout an imitative polyphonic ricercar or fantasia. In instrumental fugues of the mature Baroque (and, by extension, in vocal ones as well) the subject's profile became progressively sharper in both rhythm and pitch contour than the smooth, lyrical material of the motetlike ricercar. In

addition to giving the subject a stronger musical design, this profile also lent a clearer affection to the fugue as a whole. Manipulation of the subject in the

course of common. Baroque, With

the piece took a variety of forms. Inversion of the pitch contour was Somewhat less frequent, but not by any means rare in the later was the use of rhythmic augmentation or diminution regard to the harmonic design of the fugue, one important step was

the normalization of the tonal answer, whereby the second voice, entering at the fifth scale step from the first, could be adjusted so that it stayed within the

main key rather than immediately establishing a new one of its own. The exposition now served not only to introduce the subject and the various polyphonic voices but also to establish the harmonic center for the fugue

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Once the key center was asserted, the fugue could depart from it, achieving forward motion and tension.

The modulation might use free material or

fragmentary motives from the subject in an episode. Having arrived on a new pitch level, the fugue could attain temporary stability at that point by a return of the subject or an entire exposition. This process could be repeated in several stages, ultimately resuming the key area of the opening, At the conclusion

composers learned to increase the cadential climax by stretto, rapidly overlap-

ping imitative entries of the subject. They also reinforced the sense of har-

monic stability through the use of a pedal point.

It is impossible to overemphasize that fugue is not a form or even in the strict sense a genre. While the separate keyboard fugue perhaps comes to mind most readily when we speak of fugue, the term applies equally to ensem ble music for instruments or voices. Fugue is, in fact, simply a technique of set

of techniques that can be used in achieving a satisfying musical product in contrapuntal texture. The devices discussed briefly here represent the most common means by which composers worked out problems of musical con-

struction in imitative polyphonic pieces or movements in the Baroque period and later. They may be present or absent in any work identified as a fugue, or in many works, movements, or passages that do not bear such a designation The Suite

Stemming from the Renaissance dance pairs, the suite was the first multimoyement genre in instrumental music. In German suites from about the middle of the seventeenth century on, the appearance of dances in the order allemande, courante, sabarande, and gigue became normative, though by no means universal. The advantage to that sequence was, of course, that it provided contrast between adjacent movements, as well as progression from slower to faster movements, Other movements might be added. One such movement was the prelude, which was not in dance style; it might be in the free manner of the improvisatory solo prelude, or it might imitate a French opera overture. If the suite did adopt the usual plan, the other movements most often came after the sarabande, They might include additional allemandes or courantes, bourrées, gavottes, minuets, or a number of other dances Unity was provided over the entire span of the suite by the use of a single key throughout. To the Baroque composers and writers on music, the different dances, with their proper rhythmic styles, embodied different affections. The German theorist Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) gave a list of the affections

of the dances in his Der vollkommene Capellmeister (The complete music director, 1739): The affection of the minuet was ‘moderate gaiety”; that of the gavotte, “jubilant joy”; of the bourrée, “contentedness”, of the courante, “hope”, of the sarabande, “ambition”, and of the gigue, a variety of passions ranging from anger to flightiness. In France, the term ordre was used in preference to the word suite, The

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ordre might incorporate not only the standard types but also free pieces, and the scope of the genre increased to rake in large numbers of movements. The French composers were also fond of identifying their pieces by people's names (real or fictional) or by titles indicating affective content, rather than simply by dance nomenclature.

This French school reached its climax in the keyboard

ordres of Francois Couperin “le grand” (1668-1733). The greatest member of

a family of important musicians, Couperin served both the church and the royal court of France and authored an important treatise on keyboard playing, L'Art de toucher le clavecin (The art of playing the harpsichord, 1717). Among

the topics discussed in this treatise is the use and proper performance of the

embellishments or agréments that the French applied to the notes of the music They indicated these agréments by a wide variety of signs written above, below, or adjacent to the notes of their otherwise generally simple-looking melodic lines. The question of goat or good taste was a matter of great concern

in regard to ornamentation, as in all matters of French music, art, and life in

general at this time. Books of keyboard pieces frequently included tables of agréments and discussions of their proper use. Of course suites could be composed for any medium. In the early seventeenth century the solo suite for lute was common. As time passed, the harpsichord began to dominate the genre. Even other solo instruments, such as the viol or cello, could be given suites. With the rise of French opera, the practice of excerpting dances from stage works to make multimovement orchestral suites developed, and before long composers began to write original suites for orchestra. Since these usually started with an overture, the French term Ouver-

ture was sometimes applied to the entire suite All of the standard Baroque dances unfolded in binary form, a plan that had already begun to appear in the Renaissance. Each dance was constructed

in two main parts, and each part was repeated. The first part moved away from the main key center and cadenced ina related but contrasting area. The second half began at that point and cadenced in the opening key again. This practice is of immense significance, for it represents the beginning of the principle of tonal departure and return, tension and relaxation, that was to underlie the

development of musical form for the next two centuries.

The Mature Baroque Sonata In Italy the suite did not catch on as it did in the northern countries; instead

the most important multimovement instrumental genre was the sonata. As we

have noted, the genre evolved from the fragmentation of the Renaissance canzona into separate movements. The term sonata identified any work in contrasting movements, usually for one or more instruments with basso continuo, and later for keyboard solo,

The sonata presented its own peculiar set of challenges and rewards Among these were the development of idiomatic instrumental writing, the

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sustaining of purely musical interest, the achievement of musical shape based

on unity and contrast, and the evocation of a convincing expression. The archetype for instrumentation in the sonata was scoring for one or

two violins and basso continuo, though naturally a wide variety of combina-

tions of linear instruments was available, The violin’s idiom offered greater range and flexibility than the older vocal models, and more access to chro-

matic harmony than the wind instruments of the time. As we have already noted, the most popular and effective combination was the trio sonata scoring

with two upper parts and continuo (four players in all), for this created tex-

tural interest through the interplay of the upper lines. A sonata for solo melodic instrument and continuo constitutes a solo sonata (three players)

The Italian Baroque musicians recognized two classes of sonatas, the so-

nata da camera or chamber sonata, and the sonata da chiesa or church sonata.

The terms clearly refer to the originally intended use of the pieces, and the types differed in style accordingly. The sonata da camera was the Italian interpretation of the suite principle; it was a suite in all but name.

It comprised a set of dance movements, often

including an allemanda, a corrente, a sarabanda, and a giga. A prelude might be attached at the beginning. The sonata da chiesa differed from the sonata da camera in not employing dances, though in some cases the rhythmic idioms of the dances and their binary forms are nevertheless evident in the music.

Fugal writing is much more likely to turn up in the church sonata than in the chamber sonata. While the sonata da camera, because of its use of dance styles, was unsuit-

ble for performance in church, the sonata da chiesa could certainly be played in a secular setting. Thus in both function and style the da camera and da

chiesa types overlapped to some degree, and many sonatas do not fall clearly into one category.

Arcangelo Corelli As the Baroque era reached its height, the outstanding composer in the genre of the sonata was Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), who

had been trained in Bologna, which was then the leading center for violin playing. Corelli worked in Rome for some of the great musical patrons there, including the church San Luigi dei Francese; Queen Christina of Sweden, for whom he directed academies, as concerts were commonly called; and the Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, with whom Corelli formed a close personal friendship such as was practically unknown between noble patrons and composers in any era. His published sonatas include five sets of twelve sonatas each: opp. 1 (1681) and 3 (1689) comprise trio sonatas da chiesa; opp. 2 (1685) and 4 (1694), trio sonatas da camera; and op, 5 (1700), solo sonatas da chiesa and da camera. Opus 5 is important because an ornamented version of its violin parts was published in 1711, giving evidence of the virtuoso practice of the time. Corelli achieved a stellar reputation, and in the later eighteenth century he was regarded as the first composer to belong to the “modern” era

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What made Corelli's music so effective was that it established a new harmonic syntax. Analysis of his sonatas reveals that he employed a remark-

ably limited repertory of phrase complexes. The essential element is the perva-

sive pairing of the two upper lines in counterpoint of thirds and sixths, leading to cadential unisons or octaves. These intervals are frequently obscured because they are embellished in a variety of ways by the application of different figures; one of these, the chain of suspensions, seems almost a cliché in Corelli's works, Below the fundamentally parallel motion of the upper lines, the continuo bass works in contrary motion. Because there is a limit to the ways in which this can be handled in the approach to a cadential unison or octave, Corelli's music plays the same few harmonic patterns over and over His imagination saves these from growing tiresome, of course, and the very convincing counterpoint produces harmonic cadence formulas that give the music an unprecedented sense of forward direction. These progressions—and it is now for the first time that the word progression becomes genuinely appropriate to describe how harmony works—seemed so strong that they were adopted as natural and inevitable by following, generations. Soon they became the basis of an entire theory of harmony, but that belongs to a later chapter. Concerto

In the late seventeenth century composers began to exploit the concertato principle in adapting the ensemble sonata for performance by a larger orchestral ensemble, thereby producing the concerto. The German composer Georg, Muffat (1653-1704), who had trained under Lully and later absorbed Corelli's, style in Italy, described in the foreword to his Auserlesene Instrumental-Music (Selected instrumental music, 1701) several different ways of playing his concertos, depending on the availability of ensembles, ranging from a trio (that is, four players) to a large, mixed group: If you are lacking string players, or want to try out these concertos with only a few, you can form a complete little trio, with everything that is

necessary at any time, out of the three following parts: Violin I concertino, Violin

tino,

Il concertino,

and

Basso

continuo

and

Violoncello

concer-

Then it is to be observed that, besides piano and forte, at T.

(Tutti) all the players should play forcefully, but at S. (Solo) softly and

gently,

If, however, still more players are available, you will want to add to all the aforementioned parts the three other ones, namely, Violino primo, Violino secundo, and Violone or Harpsichord of the concerto grosso (or large

choir), and to assign to each part, as your numbers and good judgment dictate, either one, two, or three players. . . When among your musicians there are some who are able to play and

modulate the French oboe or shawm agreeably, you can get the best effect

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by using two of these instead of the two violins, and a good bassoon player. . . to form the concertino or little trio in certain of these concertos: Muffat’s instructions give us a good impression of the flexibility and practicality that governed scoring choices in these years. More importantly Muffat describes something like a sonata in which from time to time the parts are

doubled, tripled, or quadrupled by additional players, who then drop out and

return according to directions in their parts. The small solo group, which plays throughout, is called concertino, and the full ensemble, which reinforces

cer-

tain passages, is the tutti (all) or concerto grosso (big concert). Other composers

identify the complete or “concerto grosso.” intermittent support concerto. There were

group as ripieno (full). The work is then called “concerto” Another option is to have only a single solo player with from the ripieno, in which case the concerto is a solo also ripieno concertos, without soloists but exploiting

various combinations within the full ensemble,

It is important to note that the

size of the orchestra seems to range up toa dozen or perhaps, at the very most, twenty players. These concertos were intended for private wealthy homes, not for the large concert halls of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Giuseppe Torelli

Naturally a composer would wish to take advantage of

the concertato alternation of soloistic and full sound to create a logically organized musical form. The Bolognese composer Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709)

pioneered in this. The concerto typically had three movements, alternating

fast, slow, and fast tempos.

For the first and third movements Torelli devel-

oped a rational, systematic plan by which the contrast of tutti and solo sections could be coordinated with other elements of musical design.

The ripieno

played harmonically stable ritornello passages, while the soloist or concertino

group supplied modulatory episodes with more virtuosic melodic material

The first and last ritornelli would, of course, be in the home key; the other

ritornello or ritornelli took place in contrasting keys. The structure ofa simple

movement would follow an outline such as this:

Ritornello Ritornello Ritornello Ripieno Solo Ripieno Solo Ripieno Main key Contrast key Main key It is now clear that the large-scale da capo opera aria of Alessandro Scarlatti

applies the same ritornello plan to the vocal genre

Antonio Vivaldi The greatest master of the Italian Baroque concerto was Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) of Venice. Vivaldi presumably learned to play the violin from his father, a musician at St. Mark’s basilica. He studied for the priesthood and was ordained, but ill health and his musical vocation kept him from an active pastoral career. From 1704 he worked as a teacher, composer,

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and music director for the Ospedale della Pieta, one of several orphanages that

Venice maintained for the illegitimate female progeny of the sailors who put in to port there. The girl orphans became fine musicians, and the Ospedale fielded a large orchestra of from twenty to twenty-five players. Vivaldi com-

posed many concertos for the concerts they presented. In fact he left over five hundred concertos. He composed much other music, too, both church music

and operas, (He also traveled all over Europe to produce his operas, much to the frustration of his employers at the Ospedale.) Nevertheless, it was Vivaldi's concertos that made his lasting reputation Vivaldi built on Torelli’s foundation. Though they maintained the same

structural basis, the individual movements of his concertos were longer and

more elaborately developed than those of his predecessor. The slow move-

ments in particular are unprecedentedly sophisticated.

Perhaps most important, however, was Vivaldi’s approach to the composition of the ritornellos. He invented material that was perfectly suited to the tonal function demanded of it. A typical Vivaldi ritornello opens with a bold, memorable gesture that focusses closely on the main key. Then that key is reiterated through some strong motivic material, and finally the tonal center is hammered home by clearly defined Corellian cadential patterns. The sharp

definition of the material and the strength of its grip on the key allowed Vivaldi to abbreviate the ritornello at subsequent appearances, thereby tightening the form. This principle of inventing thematic or motivic material for a specific purpose in relation to harmonic structure became crucial in the eighteenth

century. The employment of a variety of melodic and figurational ideas in the

same movement, rather than concentrating on a single affective figure throughout, led away from the Baroque rhetorical aesthetic and toward new possibilities for musical style.

The appeal of the concerto to Baroque taste was natural. It embodied the principle of contrast that was essential to musical thought in the period. Its soloistic flair certainly suited the taste for dynamic, rhetorical expression. And it indulged the Baroque appetite for ornamentation and for virtuosic display It also satisfied the desire fora large, rationally articulated artistic design based on both unity and contrast. As the opera was the Baroque vocal genre par excellence, the concerto was the ideal Baroque instrumental genre

Questions for Reflection =

How did political structure affect musical life and how did processes of

musical thinking and style resemble political structures in late seventeenthcentury France, England, ltaly, and Germany?

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201

© Why would it be appropriate to describe a large Baroque opera aria asa concerto movement for voice? What significant differences are there between the two structures? How did the ideas of affective expression and of key center support large forms in instrumental and vocal music in the high Baroque?

Suggestions for Further Reading Two fine books on French Baroque music and musical life are R. M,

Isher-

wood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), and James R. Anthony, French Baroque

Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (New York: Norton, 1978).

For the history of English music in the High Baroque, see EdwardJ. Dent, Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), and Christopher Dearnley, English Church Music, 1650-1750 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970). The most comprehensive study of Purcell is Franklin B Zimmerman, Henry Purcell: His Life and Times, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)

For the history of Italian opera, see the Suggestions for Further Reading

for Chapter 12. A biography of Alessandro Scarlatti is Edward J. Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti: An Introduction to His Operas (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1979), Marcello’s Il teatro alla moda is excerpted in Oliver Strunk, Source

Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950)

On church music in Germany, see Friedrich Blume, Protestant Church Music (New York: Norton, 1974). An excellent study of Buxtehude is Kerala J. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, Organist in Liibeck (New York: Schirmer, 1987) The following books discuss the various genres and forms of instrumental music in the Baroque period: Alfred Mann, The Study of Fugue (New York Noiton, 1965); William S. Newman, The Sonata in the Baroque Era, 3d ed (New York: Norton, 1972); Arthur Hutchings, The Baroque Concerto, 3d ed

(London: Faber, 1973). Studies of important instrumental composers of the

Baroque era include Wilfred Mellers, Francois Couperin and the French Classical

Tradition (London: Dobson, 1950); Marc Pincherle, Corelli: His Life, His Music, trans. H. E. M. Russell (New York: Norton, 1968), and Vivaldi, Genius of the

Baroque, trans. Christopher Hatch (New York: Norton, 1957); Walter Kolneder, Vivaldi, trans, B, Hopkins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

THE END OF THE BAROQUE ERA

The Character of the Late Baroque Era

In the third decade of the eighteenth century there began to appear

changes in musical thought and style that supplied the roots of a new era. Yet through the middle of the century the styles of Baroque music

continued to be employed by several prominent composers, whose contributions rank as the greatest masterpieces of the period. In the present

chapter we shall consider some of these composers and some of their works,

For the most part, the composers to be discussed here did not create

new genres. Instead they explored and expanded the types of works

already established by the end of the seventeenth century; in vocal music

the opera, oratorio, sacred concerto, and cantata; in instrumental music the fugue, suite, concerto, and sonata. They brought these genres to high levels of sophistication, polish, and intensity. This is by no means to

imply that they were unoriginal; each had a strong personal style that could be stamped on the now fully developed Baroque forms, and each

is clearly recognizable in his music

As we have observed, the conclusions of the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance were marked by a mannerist stage in which composers

seemed to take such delight in the techniques of the style that technique

became an end in itself. It is not entirely appropriate to apply the term

mannerist to these late Baroque composers, though their compositional technique was often impressive in its own right. Only in some of the late

works of J. S. Bach do we find something like mannerism in its true

sense, but there the genuineness and profoundness of commitment to affective content give the music a

seeming merely to revel in technique

sincerity that entirely prevents its

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Opera Seria—Handel and Others

With the works of Alessandro Scarlatti the Baroque opera seria had reached a

stage of full development, but the genre remained extremely popular among

the European aristocracy right through the middle of the eighteenth century

Italian composers continued to write in this style, of course, and they and others spread it to centers outside Italy ‘Among these composers the greatest was George Frideric Handel (1685—

1759). Unlike most musicians of that time, Handel was not from a particularly

musical family, but his talent and desire led him away from the professional

career that his father had hoped he would follow. Asa youth he abandoned his

university studies and went to Hamburg, where he learned about opera under Reinhard Keiser and began to compose his own operas. At the age of twenty-

one he traveled to Italy, as was only natural for a budding young opera composer, to absorb the Italian style firsthand. There he met Corelli and soaked up the influence of Alessandro Scarlatti, polishing his style not only in opera but also in sacred music, secular cantatas, and instrumental genres. He was also able to get operas of his own composition produced in some of the major Italian theaters.

By 1710 Handel had established a considerable reputation and accepted

the offer of the position of music director at the elector's court in Hanover. He

immediately got permission to spend the 1710-1711 opera season in London, where, there being no national operatic tradition, Italian opera seria was a

lively fad. He had tremendous success, making a great impression on the English, as London in turn did on him. After returning to Hanover for a year he obtained a second leave of absence and returned to England, where he

stayed for the rest of his career. In 1714 Queen Anne of England died and the elector of Hanover succeeded to the English throne as George I, so Handel was once again the subject of his former master.

The German composer continued for a number of years to have a fine career in offering Italian opera to English audiences. His output in the genre totals forty operas. The greatest of these and the one most likely to be heard today is Giulio Cesare (1724), a loosely historical treatment of the story of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.

From 1720 to 1728 these works were produced

under the patronage of the king himself, through the Royal Academy of Music, an institution with a name obviously adapted from that of the opera in Paris Handel's operas show both mastery of the conventions of the Italian opera seria and imaginative handling of those conventions. Many of the arias are fine representatives of the standard da capo structure; however, some modify the

form in original ways, varying the rigidly predictable structures. Sometimes the motivation for these variants seems to be simply the elimination of excessive repetitions, but they are also often responses to the specific dramatic situations.

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After a decade and a half, however, the English audience was clearly

finding the opera seria distant and artificial. The language was foreign, the

mythological and classical plots were naturally not as familiar to the increas-

ingly middle-class musical public as to the Italian courts of that era, and the

unnaturalness of the castrato voice encountered the same objections from the English that the French had raised several decades earlier. The great satirist Joseph Addison had already attacked the Italian opera style in 1711 in the famous journal Spectator when Handel first went to England. He found the elaborate stagings ridiculous and the librettos contrived and circumlocutory

In 1728 the Royal Academy of Music failed due to poor management of both financial and personnel matters. At that very moment there happened to be available an alternative form of entertainment to which

the audiences

flocked. This was The Beggar’s Opera, concocted by the English dramatist John

Gay (1685-1732) and the German composer and theorist Johann Christoph

Pepusch (1667~1752), who spent most of his career in England. It was the first of the new genre ballad opera, which combined spoken dialogue with

simple songs accompanied by basso continuo. Ballad opera offered a variety of appeals to the London middle class: the plots, often featuring political satire, and characters were taken from contemporaty life; the words were in the vernacular, the music was simple and the tunes catchy; and, of course, it did not use castrati. Much of the music was actually borrowed or parodied from

existing popular songs.

Obviously Handel could not give up his own style to write ballad opera

tunes, Between 1729 and 1734 he and a partner collaborated in running a

New Royal Academy, but this also failed. For three more years he tried once

more. Now, however, the remaining opera-going public was divided between

Handel's theater and a rival company, the Opera of the Nobility, which fea-

tured the Italian composer Nicola Porpora (1686-1768). Handel composed a

few more operas, but it was clear that the flame of Italian opera in England was flickering its last. The competition eventually drove both companies to the verge of bankruptcy. Porpora saw which way the wind was blowing and fled back to greener pastures in Italy. Handel, however, was by this time a naturalized citizen and felt England to be his true home

One of the centers of Baroque opera in Germany was Dresden. Porpora spent some time there after the debacle in London, though he worked mostly

in Italy. Among the most admired opera seria composers in Italy and Germany

in the eighteenth century was Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783), who like

Handel left Germany for Italy to study in his formative years. He served as music director to the elector of Saxony in Dresden between 1730 and 1763

(with some extended periods in Italy during those years), and thus became to

Germany rather like Handel was to England. His work is closely associated

with that of the greatest late-Baroque opera librettist, the Vienna court poet Pietro Metastasio (1698-1792), who achieved a kind of final polishing of the conventions of Baroque operatic dramaturgy.

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‘The Metastasian opera libretto extolled rationalism and the absolutist po-

litical system in a highly stylized dramatic structure. Dialogue took place in simple recitative, leading to a character's expression in an aria of his or her affection of the moment. Characters were alloted numbers of arias according

to carefully developed schemes of theatrical hierarchy, and typically each aria was placed so that the character could immediately make an effective exit Such conventions seemed stiff and artificial to later, more naturalistic critics; yet each convention had its basis in reason, and the emphasis on solo arias rather than interaction between characters in ensembles arose inevitably out of the aesthetic in which rhetorical expression was the model for music.

The opera on the continent remained the property of the aristocracy, so Hasse was never confronted with the sort of crisis that Handel experienced in London. At the end of his life Hasse went to the brilliant court of Vienna,

where a new era in the history of musical style was soon to reach its climax The Intermezzo

As has already been noted, under the influence of the librettist Apostolo Zeno

the Italians had dropped comic episodes from their operas in the late Baroque. In the first part of the eighteenth century, comic relief was provided by entirely separate works performed between the acts of the opera seria, Such a comic musical entertainment was called an intermezzo.

The standard opera seria had three acts; as a result the intermezzi usually had two. Their plots were simple, set in the present day, and often slapstick. The characters and action derived from the stock comic situations used in

commedia dell'arte, a popular Italian street theater genre that had thrived in the sixteenth century. Usually the story revolves around a clever young woman who gets the better of a bumbling old man. The literary style of the texts was

deliberately unsophisticated. The music of the intermezzi included simple recitatives, da capo arias, and ensembles for the solo singers. The solo parts were in true Italian operatic style, not at all like the songs of the English ballad opera; they could demand very competent singers. Unique to the intermezzo

was the employment of the bass voice; basses did not appear in opera seria (The taste of the time found the idea of a bass singing music in the Italian operatic idiom inherently ludicrous.) Accompaniment for the intermezzo was provided by a reduced orchestra in a simpler style than in opera seria Intermezzi were sometimes concocted by pasticcio (patchwork) out of several existing works, and many are anonymous. It was not unusual for fine composers to write these comic dramas themselves, however; Hasse, for example, made a contribution to the genre. The most famous and historically

important intermezzo is La serva padrona (The maid mistress, 1733) by Gio-

vanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736).

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Opera in France

It is impossible to exaggerate the length of the shadow cast by the colossal figure of Lully on French opera throughout the remainder of the Baroque period. Evidence of this can be found in the operatic career of the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Rameau began as a composer

of keyboard pieces in the tradition of Couperin and established himself as a theorist with his important Traité de I'harmonie (Treatise on Harmony,

1722).

His real ambition was to succeed in the field of opera, but he was unable to make any headway. He was severely handicapped by his reputation as a theorist, for the public was deeply suspicious of music that might be academic and dull. Moreover, in Paris one needed influential friends in high places in order to get ahead. When Rameau was nearly fifty, he finally received the support of the greatest musical patron in France, the fabulously wealthy and powerful Alexandre-Jean-Joseph Le Riche de la Poupliniére. As La Poupliniére’s

household music master and composer, Rameau gained the opportunity to produce his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733. This was followed by the tremendously successful exotic opera-ballet Les Indes galantes (The elegant Indies) two years later, securing his position. Rameau continued to compose operas, opera-ballets, and later comédies-ballets, raising the operatic genres to a new level of quality unmatched by his immediate predecessors Rameau had his detractors, however, who launched against him one of the greatest polemical attacks in the history of music. They held up Lully, now dead fifty years, as the standard for French opera, and became known as Lullistes. They claimed that Rameau’s works were dense in texture and academically abstruse. He and his supporters, the Ramistes, insisted that his music maintained rather than deserted the ideals of Lully. From a twentiethcentury perspective his writing certainly sounds like it continues the Lullian tradition with considerable grace and with the addition of the progressive harmonic syntax of the post-Corellian era. Ironically, in a later operatic argument, when the conservative French felt their national style threatened from the outside, Rameau became the hero of the great French tradition Handel and the Oratorio

Once it became clear to Handel that he could no longer expect to continue his career primarily as a composer of Italian operas, he tumed his attention to a new field with greater promise, the oratorio. Before coming to England Handel had written Latin church music, both sacred and secular cantatas in Italian, oratorios in Italian and German, and even a few German sacred concertos (now lost). During his first two decades in England he wrote occasional En-

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glish anthems in the style of his adopted country. Thus he was well equipped to undertake a major turn in his oeuvre toward the oratorio Oratorios appealed strongly to the tastes of the rising English bourgeois audience. They did not have the artificialities of the opera, especially the use of castrati and the complicated sets and stage machinery. They were written in the English language, and the subjects, instead of coming from ancient Greece and Rome, were taken from the Bible, a source intimately familiar to the middle class. They had over opera the further advantage that they used the chorus, partaking of the already popular English choral tradition Handel's oratorios usually take their stories from the dramatic narratives of the Old Testament, including the heroic story of Esther (1732, originally a masque), the captivatingly human characters of King Saul and David (Saul, 1739), the epic saga of the Exodus (Israel in Egypt, 1739), the tragedy of Samson (1741), the excitement of Israel's battles for independence (Judas Maccabeus, 1746), the judgment and glory of Solomon (1749), and the moving tale of Jephtha (1751), already used by Carissimi. The best-known of the oratorios, Messiah (1742) is somewhat atypical in that it has no dramatic plot line as

such. There were nonbiblical topics, as well, such as Semele (1743) and Hercules (1745).

In some ways the oratorios resemble the opera seria. They adopt the three-act plan of the opera, they use solo recitatives for dialogue and arias for the great dramatic expressions of individual characters. Their overtures are typically in the format of the French overture. The use of the chorus is the hallmark of the genre, however, and the chorus is used much more than in the contemporary Italian oratorio. Handel modeled his oratorio choruses on the magnificent English choral anthem style. The choruses provide affective commentary, participate in the action as masses of people such as armies, and even offer narration. In the use of madrigalistic pictorialism, the chorus can set the scene with a vividness that compensates for the absence of staging and actual scenery. The performers were drawn from two main sources. The solo singers came from the theatrical and opera stages. There were no castrati (some of the male roles were handled by women, however), and basses took serious leading roles, Excellent choruses could be drawn from the English church choirs: the choir for the first performance of Messiah was made up of the combined choirs of two Dublin churches. Germany

While the many German courts of the eighteenth century largely resembled those of Italy—with private instrumental ensembles, church music, and operas—another musical world also existed. This was the civic music program,

1

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209

operating in the cities and towns that were not the domains of dukes, princes

and electors, These cities employed town musicians for various functions

including grand ceremonial occasions; often took the responsibility for music

in the city churches; and governed schools in which music was taught. To take charge of the management of these programs, the municipal authorities em-

ployed a Kantor. Many fine composers, directors, and teachers found employ-

ment under this kind of public patronage. Probably the most prominent and successful of them all was Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)

‘As a young man, Telemann went to the city of Leipzig to study law. He

soon became a prominent musical figure in the city, starting a collegium

musicum for his fellow students (Fig, 15.1), later taking on the directorship of

Leipzig’s opera house, and serving as a church organist. His prominence understandably rankled the Kantor there, Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722).

After

Telemann left Leipzig he held two court positions, in Sorau and Eisenach

From 1712 he was director of music for the city of Frankfurt, and in 1721 he

accepted a similar position at the great city of Hamburg, arguably the most prestigious such post in Germany. When Kuhnau died in 1722 Telemann was eagerly recruited by the Leipzig city fathers, and though he was not free to take

the job, he succeeded in using the offer as a bargaining chip to enhance his role in Hamburg. He added the directorship of the Hamburg Opera to his work load from 1722 until it closed in 1738.

Telemann’s works include a few operas, but the strongest impression one gets from an overview of his output is the sense of the immense demand on the Kantor for practical music. In meeting his church obligations he produced more than a thousand sacred cantatas, a substantial number of oratorios, and other sacred music. For various occasions and general use there are choral and

solo vocal pieces. Among the instrumental music are French-style orchestral overtures, concertos, sonatas, and keyboard pieces. In all this music, the style leans away from intense affectiveness and contrapuntal complexity, and concentrates on directness, simplicity, and transparency. This does not simply explain how Telemann was able to produce such a vast quantity of music but

also reflects his sensitivity to a change in musical taste that anticipated the

coming ofa new era

Johann Sebastian Bach

The composer in whose work the art and technique of Baroque music attained its consummation was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Like all composers in the periods in which the patronage system operated, his music was inextricably bound to the practical situations in which he worked. Thus we can understand some aspects of his creativity in terms of his biography. At the same time, however, Bach seems to have felt a special vocation to produce the

Figure 15.1 A collegium musicum provided a forum for the performance of Baroque secular concert music in many towns. The collegium musicum was often associated with the university. Today many universities have early music ensembles known as collegium musicum. (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Niirnberg)

ughly developed works possible in nearly every genre (except opera) of the era of which he was to see the end, For that reason, he stands out among even the fine composers with whom he was contemporary most th

Bach's Early Career Bach came from a family that produced many musicians, and to a large extent his career was rather routine. He was the son of a town musician in the

relatively small town of Eisenach. Both his parents had died by the time he was ten, and he lived for the next five years with his brother, an organist in the town of Ohrdruf.

At fifteen he went to Liineburg,

where he sang in the choir

of the Michaeliskirche in return for a free education at the school attached to

that church, In Liineburg the young Bach must have taken advantage of Georg, Bohm’s presence to learn the best of the great German organ tradition. He also traveled to Hamburg to hear another important organist, Johann Adam Reinken (1623-17 At the age of eighteen Bach began his professional career as a musician After a few months as a minor court musician in Weimar,

he found a church

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organist’s position in the town of Arnstadt. In 1704 he took a leave of absence

to go to Liibeck to hear Buxtehude’s music, staying three times as long as he had permission to. The situation in Arnstadt was unhappy in various ways, and in 1707 he left for a similar job at Miihlhausen.

The music that Bach wrote during these first years consists, as we would

expect, mostly of organ pieces for his own use. He experimented with the gebunden genre of organ pieces based on chorale melodies, and his skill as a player is abundantly evident from his free pieces such as toccatas and preludes. He was also competent in fugal writing, though the fugues of this period seem somewhat loose compared to those he crafted later in his life. At Mihl-

hausen Bach also had occasion to write sacred concertos (or, as they are more

commonly but inaccurately known, “cantatas” for special liturgical occasions. These works show that he already had a well-developed style in choral and solo vocal writing The Court of Weimar

In 1708 Bach progressed to a new style of musical life, taking an appointment

at the court of the duke in Weimar, His main duties were again as organist, and

he must have played chamber music as well. In 1714 he was promoted to the

position of Konzertmeister. Italian sonatas and concertos became available to the Weimar court orchestra, and Bach copied and transcribed works of

Vivaldi, becoming in the process familiar with the latest Italian instrumental

style. He soon began to write original works in the Italian manner, including trio sonatas for the two manuals and pedals of the organ. At Weimar Bach also wrote a number of cantatas.

Although in general Bach’s music was practical and intended to satisfy the

immediate needs of his job, he launched a project in Weimar that shows another side of his musical personality. This was the Orgel-Biichlein, a collection of chorale arrangements for the organ, based on a systematic organization keyed to the liturgical calendar. These settings were intended to incorporate

affective interpretation of the chorales’ content in their figuration, together

with the most polished contrapuntal technique. Of the projected 164 pieces in the set, Bach completed only 45. Though unfinished, the Orgel-Biichlein constitutes the first of numerous systematic compilations of pieces Bach made that

embody the essence of particular Baroque styles and genres The Court of Céthen

Bach left the service of the Duke of Weimar in 1717 for the court of the very musical prince at Céthen. Here Bach served for six years as Kapellmeister, and his duties were in the secular rather than the sacred sphere. In the realm

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of vocal music Bach composed occasional secular cantatas at Céthen but no church music.

He wrote a good deal of his chamber and orchestral music

during this time, including concertos (the well-known collection of six Bran-

denburg Concertos was assembled to represent his work in this area when he was seeking to move again) and at least two of his orchestral suites (Ouver-

tiiren) in the French sty! From the Cothen years there is also a considerable quantity of keyboard music.

His eldest son, Wilhelm

Friedemann

Bach

(1710-1784),

was old

enough to begin to study music, and Johann Sebastian put together a graded series of pieces that would teach both musical principles and perfor-

mance technique: His Clavier-Biichlein (Little keyboard book, 1720) for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach includes little dance pieces, early versions of the

inventions and sinfonias, and some of the preludes and fugues that were incorporated into the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722.

Later

came a similar collection of easy pieces, the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook, named for Bach's second wife.

These didactic collections gave Bach the opportunity to create systematically arranged anthologies of model pieces, The inventions and sinfonias are organized according to all the usually practicable keys in the unequal temper-

aments of the time (those with no more than four sharps or flats), from C

major up the scale to B minor. When he came to the preludes and fugues, Bach adopted the still-new idea of equal temperament and wrote one in each of the

twenty-four major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. Fach piece has its

own, unique affective character and compositional style, and at the same time they are arranged in an abstract pattern to form a clearly planned whole

The City of Leipzig In 1723, after the city fathers of Leipzig were unsuccessful in attracting as Kantor either Telemann

or several of their other choices, they settled on

Johann Sebastian Bach. His Cothen prince's interest in music had waned, so Bach accepted the position, which he retained until his death, His responsibilities in Leipzig were numerous and varied. He was associated with the St. Thomas Church and School, where he taught Latin as well as music, and

supervised the music for four churches and special music for civic occasions (Fig, 15.2)

The church music in Leipzig was a complicated affair. At the smallest

church a unison choir of boys led the service. At the next larger church a

four-part choir sang simple settings of chorales, At the two largest churches

there were either elaborate polyphonic motets or full-scale concerted cantatas, switching back and forth between the two churches on alternate Sundays.

Thus Bach had to produce a cantata every week. His immediate concern was

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Figure 15.2 The St. Thomas Church and School where Bach worked for much of his

career were the subject of this pencil drawing by the nineteenth-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn helped launch the revival of Bach’s music, and he led the campaign to construct the Bach monument, also shown here.

Berlin)

(Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek Preuftischer Kulturbesitz,

to compose a repertoire of these cantatas to update the choir library. He did this fairly regularly over the first years of his tenure in Leipzig, so that there were several complete cycles for the entire liturgical year. Two of these cycles were completed in 1723-1724 and 1724-1725, another from

1725 to 1727,

a fourth in 1728-1729, and a final one over several years beginning in 1729 Two hundred cantatas have survived, but a number are known to have been lost The musical force for the cantatas included a small choir and orchestra Bach pleaded with the authorities for three singers on each of the four parts, and intended generally from one to three players on each orchestral instrument, givinga choir of twelve and an orchestra of around twenty. The instrumentalists came partly from the school and partly from the city band

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The typical plan fora cantata included six movements: an opening chorus, a solo recitative, and an aria or duet, all sung before the sermon; then another recitative, another aria or duet, and a chorale, in the second half of the service. Other movements might be added. The first movement is sometimes an elaborate arrangement of a chorale (often the same chorale that concludes the cantata) in concerted style. The poetry for the free or “madrigalistic” movements and recitatives of the cantatas (.e., those not based on the chorales) was by contemporary poets; two of the most important were Erdmann Neumeister (1671-1756) and Christian Friedrich Henrici (1700-1764), who wrote under

the pseudonym Picander In addition to cantatas, Bach's sacred vocal music includes motets based on either biblical or chorale texts, Latin Mass settings (still used in the German church at that time), and oratorios, The so-called Christmas and Easter oratorios were constructed from cantatas and are not in the usual dramatic vein of oratorios. Bach's greatest oratorios are the Passion oratorios based on the gospel narratives of John (1724) and Matthew (1727). They should be thought of as belonging to Good Friday in the liturgical cycles with the Sunday cantatas They combine the scriptural texts with chorales and free, meditative arias, duets, and choruses. Bach adapted the free texts for the St. John Passion from the poetry of B. H. Brockes (1680-1747), which Handel also set; those for the St. Matthew Passion came from Picander. The narration is taken by a tenor in the role of the evangelist or gospel author, and it and the dialogue are sung in recitative, The chorus is used for crowd scenes (turba) and the disciples, as well as for reflective chorales and madrigalistic choruses. The solo singers also provide comment and reflection in arias and duets. The musicians for the St Matthew Passion include two choirs and orchestras as well as solo singers In 1729 Bach added to his busy schedule the directorship of the collegium musicum that Telemann had founded. This allowed him to turn again to secular orchestral and chamber music, He used works from Céthen, but he also composed new pieces, including two more orchestral suites, concertos for the harpsichord, and sonatas. He led the collegium musicum until 1737 Bach's Culmination of Baroque Styles

By about 1730 it must have been clear to Bach that the Baroque aesthetic and style embodied in his music were soon to be replaced bya new kind of musical thought. He had composed in all the Baroque genres except opera, for which he had never had a need in the professional positions he held. At Leipzig his available practical repertoire was now substantial, and he had thoroughly learned the ins and outs of the musical organization for which he was responsible. All these factors help to explain a number of rather special works and collections that he produced during the 1730s and 1740s, These works seem

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215,

to be deliberately intended to serve as paradigmatic models of the styles of Baroque music, laid out according to clear governing plans, following in the pattern that Bach had set for himself in the Orgel-Biichlein and the WellTempered Clavier. (The second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier actually belongs to this period.) The first of these paradigmatic collections comprises the four parts of the Clavieriibung (Keyboard practice). The first part was a set of six partitas (suites) for harpsichord, collected and published in 1731. The second part (1735) combines representative harpsichord pieces in two contrasting national styles a French overture and dance suite placed side by side with an Italian concerto The third part (1739) represents the German organ heritage in a collection of chorale preludes framed by a great prelude and fugue. The fourth part (1741— 1742) is a set of thirty variations, the so-called Goldberg Variations, of which every third one is a canon at a particular interval, that is, at the unison, the second, the third, and so on Bach's great paradigmatic vocal work is the so-called B-minor Mass. This

was assembled in about 1747-1749 out of existing pieces. The B-minor Mass

cannot be regarded as a liturgical work, partly because the Lutheran church did not use the full Latin Mass, and partly because it is too huge to be practicable. Rather, it collates movements in the various styles of sacred vocal music, from the old-fashioned stile antico to the most brilliant concertato scoring The layout of the traditional Mass serves as Bach’s grand framework, but even within individual movements the subdivisions are logically and symmetrically conceived Three sets of chorale-based organ pieces also belong in the category of Bach's paradigmatic collections. The first is a group of eighteen chorales mostly composed in the Weimar period but assembled in around 1747 to demonstrate a variety of approaches. The second is a set of six chorales arranged from cantata movements and published in 1748 or 1749 by Schiibler. The third collection was written on the occasion of Bach's election in 1747 to the Society of the Musical Sciences and consists of five canonic variations on the Christmas chorale "Vom Himmel hoch.” In 1747 Bach paid a visit to his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), who was employed as harpsichordist to the flute-playing Prussian King Frederick I] (Frederick the Great) at the royal court in Potsdam, near

Berlin, On that occasion J. S. Bach was given a fugue subject, purportedly invented by Frederick, on which to improvise at the piano. After his return to Leipzig Bach wrote out the three-part “ricercar” he had improvised, added a six-part ricercar, a trio sonata for flute with violin and continuo, and ten canons, all based on the “royal theme,” and dedicated the set of pieces to the king under the title Musical Offering Following the idea ofa monothematic collection that he had already used in the “Vom Himmel hoch” variations and the Musical Offering, Bach began his most technically complex composition, The Art of Fugue in the late 1740s,

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leaving it not quite complete at his death. The plan of the collection was to proceed systematically through the art of fugal composition, from simple fugues up to a quadruple fugue, one of whose four subjects was formed from the musical notes B-A-C-H (B indicating B flat, and H indicating B natural in

German), and not neglecting strict canons at various intervals. Bach died before the publication could be completed, so that the end of the quadruple fugue is missing and the final structure imperfect. Nevertheless, it ranks as the greatest practical study of contrapuntal technique in the history of music. Questions for Reflection

How were Handel's and Bach's responses to changing musical tastes different?

How did the French and Italian attitudes toward their national operatic styles reflect their different national interests and their political situations in

the late Baroque period? In what ways did the different balances of influence among the social

classes affect music in England, France, Germany, and Italy at the end of the

Baroque era?